Long-winded Speakers.

Josh Billings once remarked that when some speakers strike oil they forget to stop boring.

After an hour and a half of preaching, a clergyman who was given to both long-windedness and fanciful flights of oratory, was just getting warmed up to his sermon on immortality.

“I looked up to the mountains,” he shouted, “and I said, ‘Mighty as you are, you will be destroyed; but my soul will not.’ I gazed at the ocean and cried, ‘Vast as you are, you will eventually dry up, but not I.'”

And then he wondered why his hearers smiled.

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