.

Now the master has set everything to rights, and is ready to go home to
dinner. Yet he goes reluctantly. The old man has spent so much of his
life in the smoky, noisy, buzzing school-room, that, when he has a
holiday, he feels as if his place were lost and himself a stranger in
the world. But forth he goes; and there stands our old chair, vacant
and solitary, till good Master Cheever resumes his seat in it to-morrow
morning.

"Grandfather," said Charley, "I wonder whether the boys did not use to
upset the old chair when the schoolmaster was out."

"There is a tradition," replied Grandfather, "that one of its arms was
dislocated in some such manner. But I cannot believe that any school-boy
would behave so naughtily."

As it was now later than little Alice's usual bedtime, Grandfather broke
off his narrative, promising to talk more about Master Cheever and his
scholars some other evening.

CHAPTER IV. COTTON MATHER

Accordingly, the next evening, Grandfather resumed the history of his
beloved chair.

"Master Ezekiel Cheever," said he, "died in 1707, after having taught
school about seventy years. It would require a pretty good scholar in
arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch
rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness
for his pupils. Almost all the great men of that period, and for many
years back, had been whipped into eminence by Master Cheever. Moreover,
he had written a Latin Accidence, which was used in schools more than
half a century after his death; so that the good old man, even in his
grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys."

Grandfather proceeded to say, that, when Master Cheever died, he
bequeathed the chair to the most learned man that was educated at his
school, or that had ever been born in America. This was the renowned
Cotton Mather, minister of the Old North Church in Boston.

"And author of the Magnalia, Grandfather, which we sometimes see you
reading," said Laurence.

"Yes, Laurence," replied Grandfather. "The Magnalia is a strange,
pedantic history, in which true events and real personages move before
the reader with the dreamy aspect which they wore in Cotton Mather's
singular mind. This huge volume, however, was written and published
before our chair came into his possession. But, as he was the author
of more books than there are days in the year, we may conclude that he
wrote a great deal