It was a merry supper, and when it ended Mr. Hacket rose and took the green chair from the table, exclaiming: 

“Michael Henry, God bless you!”

Then he kissed his wife and said: 

“Maggie, you wild rose of Erin!  I’ve been all day in the study.  I must take a walk or I shall get an exalted abdomen.  One is badly beaten in the race o’ life when his abdomen gets ahead of his toes.  Children, keep our young friend happy here until I come back, and mind you, don’t forget the good fellow in the green chair.”

Mary helped her mother with the dishes, while I sat with a book by the fireside.  Soon Mrs. Hacket and the children came and sat down with me.

“Let’s play backgammon,” Mary proposed.

“I don’t want to,” said John.

“Don’t forget Michael Henry,” she reminded.

“Who is Michael Henry?” I asked.

“Sure, he’s the boy that has never been born,” said Mrs. Hacket.  “He was to be the biggest and noblest one o’ them—­kind an’ helpful an’ cheery hearted an’ beloved o’ God above all the others.  We try to live up to him.”

He seemed to me a very strange and wonderful creature—­this invisible occupant of the green chair.

I know now what I knew not then that Michael Henry was the spirit of their home—­an ideal of which the empty green chair was a constant reminder.

We played backgammon and Old Maid and Everlasting until Mr. Hacket returned.

He sat down and read aloud from the Letters of an Englishwoman in America.

“Do you want to know what sleighing is?” she wrote.  “Set your chair out on the porch on a Christmas day.  Put your feet in a pail-full of powdered ice.  Have somebody jingle a bell in one ear and blow into the other with a bellows and you will have an exact idea of it.”

When she told of a lady who had been horned by a large insect known as a snapdragon, he laughed loudly and closed the book and said: 

“They have found a new peril of American life.  It is the gory horn of the snapdragon.  Added to our genius for boastfulness and impiety, it is a crowning defect.  Ye would think that our chief aim was the cuspidor.  Showers of expectoration and thunder claps o’ profanity and braggart gales o’ Yankee dialect!—­that’s the moral weather report that she sends back to England.  We have faults enough, God knows, but we have something else away beneath them an’ none o’ these writers has discovered it.”

The sealed envelope which Mr. Wright had left at our home, a long time before that day, was in my pocket.  At last the hour had come when.  I could open it and read the message of which I had thought much and with a growing interest.

I rose and said that I should like to go to my room.  Mr. Hacket lighted a candle and took me up-stairs to a little room where my chest had been deposited.  There were, in the room, a bed, a chair, a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte and a small table on which were a dictionary, a Bible and a number of school books.