“But, after all,” continued Grandfather, “any other old chair, if it possessed memory, and a hand to write its recollections, could record stranger stories than any that I have told you.  From generation to generation, a chair sits familiarly in the midst of human interests, and is witness to the most secret and confidential intercourse, that mortal man can hold with his fellow.  The human heart may best be read in the fireside chair.  And as to external events, Grief and Joy keep a continual vicissitude around it and within it.  Now we see the glad face and glowing form of Joy, sitting merrily in the old chair, and throwing a warm fire-light radiance over all the household.  Now, while we thought not of it, the dark clad mourner, Grief, has stolen into the place of Joy, but not to retain it long.  The imagination can hardly grasp so wide a subject, as is embraced in the experience of a family chair.”

“It makes my breath flutter,—­my heart thrill,—­to think of it,” said Laurence.  “Yes; a family chair must have a deeper history than a Chair of State.”

“O, yes!” cried Clara, expressing a woman’s feeling on the point in question, “The history of a country is not nearly so interesting as that of a single family would be.”

“But the history of a country is more easily told,” said Grandfather.  “So, if we proceed with our narrative of the chair, I shall still confine myself to its connection with public events.”

Good old Grandfather now rose and quitted the room, while the children remained gazing at the chair.  Laurence, so vivid was his conception of past times, would hardly have deemed it strange, if its former occupants, one after another, had resumed the seat which they had each left vacant, such a dim length of years ago.

First, the gentle and lovely lady Arbella would have been seen in the old chair, almost sinking out of its arms, for very weakness; then Roger Williams, in his cloak and band, earnest, energetic, and benevolent; then the figure of Anne Hutchinson, with the like gesture as when she presided at the assemblages of women; then the dark, intellectual face of Vane, “young in years, but in sage counsel old.”  Next would have appeared the successive governors, Winthrop, Dudley, Bellingham, and Endicott, who sat in the chair, while it was a Chair of State.  Then its ample seat would have been pressed by the comfortable, rotund corporation of the honest mint-master.  Then the half-frenzied shape of Mary Dyer, the persecuted Quaker woman, clad in sackcloth and ashes, would have rested in it for a moment.  Then the holy apostolic form of Eliot would have sanctified it.  Then would have arisen, like the shade of departed Puritanism, the venerable dignity of the white-bearded Governor Bradstreet.  Lastly, on the gorgeous crimson cushion of Grandfather’s chair, would have shone the purple and golden magnificence of Sir William Phips.