this slough
that they have been ordained to drain and dry up. For ages and ages the
royal surveyors have been laying out all their skill on this slough. More
cartloads than you could count of the best material for filling up a
slough have been shot into it, and yet you would never know that so much
as a single labourer had emptied his barrow here. True, excellent
stepping-stones have been laid across the slough by skilful engineers,
but they are always so slippery with the scum and slime of the slough,
that it is only now and then that a traveller can keep his feet upon
them. Altogether, our author's picture of the Slough of Despond is such
a picture that no one who has seen it can ever forget it. But better
than reading the best description of the slough is to see certain well-
known pilgrims trying to cross it. Mr. Fearing at the Slough of Despond
was a tale often told at the tavern suppers of that country. Never
pilgrim attempted the perilous journey with such a chicken-heart in his
bosom as this Mr. Fearing. He lay above a month on the bank of the
slough, and would not even attempt the steps. Some kind Pilgrims, though
they had enough to do to keep the steps themselves, offered him a hand;
but no. And after they were safely over it made them almost weep to hear
the man still roaring in his horror at the other side. Some bade him go
home if he would not take the steps, but he said that he would rather
make his grave in the slough than go back one hairsbreadth. Till, one
sunshiny morning,--no one knew how, and he never knew how himself--the
steps were so high and dry, and the scum and slime were so low, that this
hare-hearted man made a venture, and so got over. But, then, as an
unkind friend of his said, this pitiful pilgrim had a slough of despond
in his own mind which he carried always and everywhere about with him,
and made him the proverb of despondency that he was and is. Only, that
sunshiny morning he got over both the slough inside of him and outside of
him, and was heard by Help and his family singing this song on the hither
side of the slough: 'He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of
the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.'

Our pilgrim did not have such a good crossing as Mr. Fearing. Whether it
was that the discharge from the city was deeper and fouler, or that the
day was darker, or what, we are not told, but both Christian and Pliable
were in a mo