'It was a good large room with big closets, and a bed which might have served for a whole boarding-school,to say nothing of a couple of oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army; but what struck Tom's fancy most was a strange, grim-looking,high backed chair, carved in the most fantastic manner,with a flowered damask cushion, and the round knobs at the bottom of the legs carefully tied up in red cloth,as if it had got the gout in its toes. Of any other queer chair, Tom would only have thought it was a queer chair, and there would have been an end of the matter;but there was something about this particular chair,and yet he couldn't tell what it was, so odd and so unlike any other piece of furniture he had ever seen,that it seemed to fascinate him. He sat down before the fire, and stared at the old chair for half an hour.Damn the chair, it was such a strange old thing, he couldn't take his eyes off it.