belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted,
the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring. The
rough flagged floor, "all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of
generations of ringers," remains undisturbed. One cannot see the door,
set in its solid masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing
in it, after conscience, "beginning to be tender," told him that "such
practice was but vain," but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of
seeing others ring, hoping that, "if a bell should fall," he could "slip
out" safely "behind the thick walls," and so "be preserved
notwithstanding." Behind the church, on the south side, stand some
picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the
Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early
part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones,
which may have given Bunyan the first idea of "the very stately Palace,
the name of which was Beautiful."

The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields
at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its
site has passed away. That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655)
after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still
standing in the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of
all interest.

From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the
earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the
subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy
descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which
has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other
side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if
Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish
descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of
the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the
decided negative with which his question was met--"he told me, 'No, we
were not'"--would, one would have thought, have settled the point. But
some fictions die hard. However low the family had sunk, so that in his
own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most
despised of all the families in the land," "of a low and inconsiderable
generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in
Bunyan's native county