Mr. Spooner was widely known, especially by fellow travellers on the railroad, as an expert and entertaining story teller, and skilful in the art. He knew how to tell a story, omitting details, careful never to say that he had a capital story, being willing to leave its quality to the judgment of his listeners, never laughing until he had finished, and then when his companions began to laugh he would join with them as heartily as if he had never told the story before. He told many stories about his great uncle, Deacon Ephraim Spooner, which seemed to amuse some persons, the humor of which I never could see. But he had a nearer kinsman, his own uncle, Thomas Spooner, who was a man of both wit and humor, from whom he must have acquired his own delicate sense of these qualities. Thomas Spooner was at one time town treasurer, and many years a constable. One evening he was called upon to serve a precept, and while making his way in the dark through a private yard he encountered a clothes line, and then a second one which knocked off his hat. “By George,” said he, “I never knew before what the Bible meant by ‘precept upon precept; line upon line.’” He was an ardent whig, and when returning home one day after an absence of a couple of days, he found posted on the town tree a notice for a democratic meeting. “By thunder,” said he, “can’t I leave town twenty-four hours without there being the devil to pay?” and he pulled the notice down. Mr. Bourne Spooner, not only as occasion offered, repeated stories which his tenacious memory had treasured up, but he found satire and humor in the incidents of every day life, which he often used to point a moral, as for instance, the case of the old lady who had a husband somewhat addicted to profanity, and who when rebuked by a sister of the church then attending revival meetings because she bestowed so much care on her husband, who she said was a bad man, replied, “I know sister, my husband is a very bad man, and has little to expect in the next world, so I feel it my duty to do what I can for his comfort and happiness in this.”