ts
old place in the rear of _Harper's Magazine_ was stored in the warehouse
of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event
which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a
pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be
lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of
for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial
robes--for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair,
except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought and
deep-felt tribute to its last occupant--stood with bowed face and
uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it
abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis.

It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses that
the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal editor
went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in one of
those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and bric-a-brac are
guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not taught him, he would
have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had
suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has
long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr.
Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old
hearts that are still young for his _Dream Life_ and his _Reveries of a
Bachelor_, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the
real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had "a
way of throwing" himself back in the Easy Chair, "and indulging in an
easy and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in
such chit-chat with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift of
the town talk, while it relieved greatly the monotony of his office
hours." Not "bent on choosing mere gossip," he promised to be "on the
watch for such topics or incidents as" seemed really important and
suggestive, and to set them "down with all that gloss, and that happy
lack of sequence, which make every-day talk so much better than
every-day writing."

While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory and
practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast
in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his
pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call