e Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the
very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet
decent and worthy in their ways." John Bunyan's mother was his father's
second wife. The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily
consoled themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
successor. Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
1603, the date of his father's baptism. But before the year was out his
grandfather had married again. His father, too, had not completed his
twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
1623. She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of
seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two
months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a
third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when
he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife. But
he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the time
of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first wife
would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a
widower and his second marriage.

Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy town
of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree. Its name in its
original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the _stow_ or stockaded
place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in
1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of
the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, in honour of the
mother of the Emperor Constantine. The parish church, so intimately
connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of
the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to
contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of
the conventual church. Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, peaked dormers,
and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckl