at the height
of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a religious man,
it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache."

This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
escapes from accidents which threatened his life--"judgments mixed with
mercy" he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly
forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford
river"--the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds
having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the
Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the
Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt of
danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on with admiration, what
he mistakenly supposed to be an adder's sting.

These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in his brief
career as a soldier which his anonymous biographer tells us "made so deep
an impression upon him that he would never mention it, which he often
did, without thanksgiving to God." But for this occurrence, indeed, we
should have probably never known that he had ever served in the army at
all. The story is best told in his own provokingly brief words--"When I
was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to
besiege it. But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired
to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming
to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket
bullet and died." Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan's
autobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details.
This is characteristic of the man. The religious import of the
occurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; their
temporal setting, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of no
account to him. He gives us not the slightest clue to the name of the
besieged place, or even to the side on which he was engaged. The date of
the event is left equally vague. The last point however we are able to
determine with something like accuracy. November, 1644, was the earliest
period at which Bunyan could have entered the army, for it was not till
then that he reached the regulation age of sixteen. Domestic
circumstances had then recently occurred which may have tended to
estrange him from his home, and turn his thoughts to a military