He’d better be careful, that’s all.

(II) THE MINISTER WHOSE CHURCH HE ATTENDS

A dull man.  Dull is the only word I can think of that exactly describes him—­dull and prosy.  I don’t say that he is not a good man.  He may be.  I don’t say that he is not.  I have never seen any sign of it, if he is.  But I make it a rule never to say anything to take away a man’s character.

And his sermons!  Really that sermon he gave last Sunday on Esau seemed to me the absolute limit.  I wish you could have heard it.  I mean to say—­drivel.  I said to my wife and some friends, as we walked away from the church, that a sermon like that seemed to me to come from the dregs of the human intellect.  Mind you, I don’t believe in criticising a sermon.  I always feel it a sacred obligation never to offer a word of criticism.  When I say that the sermon was punk, I don’t say it as criticism.  I merely state it as a fact.  And to think that we pay that man eighteen hundred dollars a year!  And he’s in debt all the time at that.  What does he do with it?  He can’t spend it.  It’s not as if he had a large family (they’ve only four children).  It’s just a case of sheer extravagance.  He runs about all the time.  Last year it was a trip to a Synod Meeting at New York—­away four whole days; and two years before that, dashing off to a Scripture Conference at Boston, and away nearly a whole week, and his wife with him!

What I say is that if a man’s going to spend his time gadding about the country like that—­here to-day and there to-morrow—­how on earth can he attend to his parochial duties?

I’m a religious man.  At least I trust I am.  I believe —­and more and more as I get older—­in eternal punishment.  I see the need of it when I look about me.  As I say, I trust I am a religious man, but when it comes to subscribing fifty dollars as they want us to, to get the man out of debt, I say “No.”

True religion, as I see it, is not connected with money.

(III) HIS PARTNER AT BRIDGE

The man is a complete ass.  How a man like that has the nerve to sit down at a bridge table, I don’t know.  I wouldn’t mind if the man had any idea—­even the faintest idea—­of how to play.  But he hasn’t any.  Three times I signalled to him to throw the lead into my hand and he wouldn’t:  I knew that our only ghost of a chance was to let me do all the playing.  But the ass couldn’t see it.  He even had the supreme nerve to ask me what I meant by leading diamonds when he had signalled that he had none.  I couldn’t help asking him, as politely as I could, why he had disregarded my signal for spades.  He had the gall to ask in reply why I had overlooked his signal for clubs in the second hand round; the very time, mind you, when I had led a three spot as a sign to him to let me play the whole game.  I couldn’t help saying to him, at the end of the evening, in a tone of such evident satire that anyone but an ass would have recognised it, that I had seldom had as keen an evening at cards.