Oh dear me! If I only had 'Brown's troches,' or the syrup of squills, or a mustard plaster, or a woolen stocking turned wrong side out around my neck!" Brethren and sisters who took cold by sitting in the same draught join the clamor, and it is glottis to glottis, and laryngitis to laryngitis, and a chorus of scrapings and explosions which make the service hideous for a preacher of sensitive nerves.
We have seen people under the pulpit coughing with their mouth so far open we have been tempted to jump into it.

There are some persons who have a convenient ecclesiastical cough.

It does not trouble them ordinarily; but when in church you get them thoroughly cornered with some practical truth, they smother the end of the sentences with a favorite paroxysm.

There is a man in our church who is apt to be taken with one of these fits just as the contribution box comes to him, and cannot seem to get his breath again till he hears the pennies rattling in the box behind him.

Cough by all means, but put on the brakes when you come to the down grade, or send the racket through at least one fold of your pocket-handkerchief.
Governor Wiseman went on further to say that the habits of the pulpit sometimes annoyed him as much as the habits of the pew.