David, his lanky form slid down in his great chair so that he was sitting on the small of his back, had been thinking over his sermon for the next Sunday. No one could sit in David's great chair without sliding down and down and down into comfort or into extreme discomfort. It had taken David a long time to become part of the chair, so that he could feel the comfort of utter relaxation of body it demanded. In time the chair grew to be a part of the David we all knew. Those of us who knew him best can never forget him as he was when he sat in that old chair, his feet on the floor, his knees almost as high as his chin, his hands loosely folded over his waist, so that his thin, expressive thumbs could tap together in, emphasis as he talked, and his head forward so that his chin rested on the bosom of his shirt. Slumped down like this in the great chair, he talked to us of things we talked of nowhere else. We could talk religion with David when he was in his chair quite as if it were an interesting subject. Many of us can remember his smile as he listened to our feeble objections to his logic, or how he ran his hand through his curls and tossed one knee on top of the other when it was time to bring the full battery of his mind against us. It was while slumped into his great chair that David had most of his famous word battles with old Doc Benedict, and there, his fine brow creased, he listened when Rose Hinch told of someone in need or in trouble. When we happened in and David was out and we waited for him in his study that chair was the _emptiest_ chair man ever saw in the world. The hollows of the threadbare old green rep always seemed to hunger for David as no other chair ever hungered for any other man. No other man or woman ever fitted the chair. I always felt like an overturned turtle in it, with my neck vainly trying to get my head above the engulfing hollow. Only David and little children felt comfortable in the chair, for in it little children--David's own or others--could curl up as comfortably as a kitten in a rug. It was out of this chair David scrambled, full of fight, when 'Thusia brought him the news that Mack was drunk. What 'Thusia had to tell David was clear enough and sad enough. From his great chair, when David raised his eyes, he could see the Mannings' house across the way, white with green blinds, cool in the afternoon shadows. Sometimes Amy Manning and sometimes her mother and sometimes both sat on the porch, busied with the trifles of needlework women love. It was always a pleasant picture, the house framed between the trunks of two great maples, the lawn crisply cut and mottled with sunshine and shadow, and at one side of the house a spot of geranium glowing red in the sun with, at the other side, a mass of shrubbery against which a foliage border of red and green fell, in the afternoons, just within the shadow and had all the quality of rich Italian brocade.