Did I never tell you the story?  Is it possible?  Draw up your chair. 
Stick of wood, Harry.  Smoke?

You’ve heard of my Uncle Popworth, though.  Why, yes!  You’ve seen him;—­the eminently respectable elderly gentleman who came one day last summer just as you were going; book under his arm, you remember; weed on his hat; dry smile on bland countenance; tall, lank individual in very seedy black.  With him my tale begins; for if I had never indulged in an Uncle Popworth I should never have sported an Iron-Clad.

Quite right, sir; his arrival was a surprise to me.  To know how great a surprise, you must understand why I left city, friends, business, and settled down in this quiet village.  It was chiefly, sir, to escape the fascinations of that worthy old gentleman that I bought this place, and took refuge here with my wife and little ones.  Here we had respite, respite and nepenthe from our memories of Uncle Popworth; here we used to sit down in the evening and talk of the past with grateful and tranquil emotions, as people speak of awful things endured in days that are no more.  To us the height of human happiness was raising green corn and strawberries, in a retired neighborhood where uncles were unknown.  But, sir, when that Phantom, that Vampire, that Fate, loomed before my vision that day, if you had said, “Trover, I’ll give ye sixpence for this neat little box of yours,” I should have said, “Done!” with the trifling proviso that you should take my uncle in the bargain.

The matter with him?  What indeed could invest human flesh with such terrors,—­what but this? he was—­he is—­let me shriek it in your ear—­a bore—­a BORE! of the most malignant type; an intolerable, terrible, unmitigated BORE!

That book under his arm was a volume of his own sermons;—­nine hundred and ninety-nine octavo pages, O Heaven!  It wasn’t enough for him to preach and re-preach those appalling discourses, but then the ruthless man must go and print ’em!  When I consider what booksellers—­worthy men, no doubt, many of them, deserving well of their kind—­he must have talked nearly into a state of syncope before ever he found one to give way, in a moment of weakness, of utter exhaustion and despair, and consent to publish him; and when I reflect what numbers of inoffensive persons, in the quiet walks of life, have been made to suffer the infliction of that Bore’s Own Book, I pause, I stand aghast at the inscrutability of Divine Providence.

Don’t think me profane, and don’t for a moment imagine I underrate the function of the preacher.  There’s nothing better than a good sermon,—­one that puts new life into you.  But what of a sermon that takes life out of you? instead of a spiritual fountain, a spiritual sponge that absorbs your powers of body and soul, so that the longer you listen the more you are impoverished?  A merely poor sermon isn’t so bad; you will find, if you are the right kind of a hearer, that it will suggest something