Setting aside Grandfather and his auditors, and excepting the adventures of the chair, which form the machinery of the work, nothing in the ensuing pages can be termed fictitious. The author, it is true, has sometimes assumed the license of filling up the outline of history with details for which he has none but imaginative authority, but which, he hopes, do not violate nor give a false coloring to the truth. He believes that, in this respect, his narrative will not be found to convey ideas and impressions of which the reader may hereafter find it necessary to purge his mind. The author’s great doubt is, whether he has succeeded in writing a book which will be readable by the class for whom he intends it. To make a lively and entertaining narrative for children, with such unmalleable material as is presented by the sombre, stern, and rigid characteristics of the Puritans and their descendants, is quite as difficult an attempt as to manufacture delicate playthings out of the granite, rocks on which New England is founded. GRANDFATHER’S CHAIR. PART I. 1620-1692. CHAPTER I. GRANDFATHER AND THE CHILDREN AND THE CHAIR. GRANDFATHER had been sitting in his old arm-chair all that pleasant afternoon, while the children were pursuing their various sports far off or near at hand, Sometimes you would have said, “Grandfather is asleep;” hut still, even when his eyes were closed, his thoughts were with the young people, playing among the flowers and shrubbery of the garden. He heard the voice of Laurence, who had taken possession of a heap of decayed branches which the gardener had lopped from the fruit-trees, and was building a little hut for his cousin Clara and himself. He heard Clara’s gladsome voice, too, as she weeded and watered the flower-bed which had been given her for her own. He could have counted every footstep that Charley took, as he trundled his wheelbarrow along the gravel-walk. And though’ Grandfather was old and gray-haired, yet his heart leaped with joy whenever little Alice came fluttering, like a butterfly, into the room. Sire had made each of the children her playmate in turn, and now made Grandfather her playmate too, and thought him the merriest of them all. At last the children grew weary of their sports, because a summer afternoon is like a long lifetime to the young. So they came into the room together, and clustered round Grandfather’s great chair. Little Alice, who was hardly five years old, took the privilege of the youngest, and climbed his knee. It was a pleasant thing to behold that fair and golden-haired child in the lap of the old man, and to think that, different as they were, the hearts of both could be gladdened with the same joys. “Grandfather,” said little Alice, laying her head back upon his arm, “I am very tired now. You must tell me a story to make me go to sleep.”