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. "These were Mary's books," said Mr. Hacket. "I told yer uncle that ye could use them an' welcome. There's another book here which ye may study if ye think it worth the bother. It's a worn an' tiresome book, my lad, but I pray God ye may find no harm in it. Use it as often as ye will. It is the book o' my heart. Ye will find in it some kind o' answer to every query in the endless flight o' them that's coming on, an' may the good God help us to the truth." He turned and bade me good night and went away and closed the door. I sat down and opened the sealed envelope with trembling hands, and found in it this brief note: "DEAR PARTNER: I want you to ask the wisest man you know to explain these words to you. I suggest that you commit them to memory and think often of their meaning. They are from Job: "'His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust.' "I believe that they are the most impressive in all the literature I have read. "Yours truly, SILAS WRIGHT, JR."