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, 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 repreach those appalling discourses, but then the ruthless man must go and print 'em! When I consider what book-sellers--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.