and introspective. It took many sharp trials and many
bitter disappointments to take the inborn frivolity and superficiality
out of this young man's heart. He was far on in his life, he was far on
even in his religious life, before you would have ever thought of calling
him a serious-minded man. Hopeful had been born and brought up to early
manhood in the town of Vanity, and he knew nothing better and desired
nothing better than to lay out his whole life and to rest all his hopes
on the things of the fair; on such things, that is, as houses, lands,
places, honours, preferments, titles, pleasures, and delights of all
sorts. And that vain and empty life went on with him, till, as he told
his companion afterwards, it had all ended with him in revelling, and
drinking, and uncleanness, and Sabbath-breaking, and all such things as
destroyed his soul. But in Hopeful's happy case also the blood of the
martyrs became the seed of the church. Hopeful, as he was afterwards
called, had suffered so many bitter disappointments and shipwrecks of
expectation from the things of the fair, that is to say, from the houses,
the places, the preferments, the pleasures and what not, of the fair,
that even his heart was ripe for something better than any of those
things, when, as God would have it, Christian and Faithful came to the
town. Hopeful was still hanging about the booths of the fair; he was
just fingering his last sixpence over a commodity that he knew quite well
would be like gall in his belly as soon as he had bought it; when,--what
is that hubbub that rolls down the street? Hopeful was always the first
to see and to hear every new thing that came to the town, and thus it was
that he was soon in the thick of the tumult that rose around Christian
and Faithful. Had those two pilgrims come to the town at any former
time, Hopeful would have been among the foremost to mock at and smite the
two men; but, to-day, Hopeful's heart is so empty, and his purse also,
that he is already won to their side by the loving looks and the wise and
sweet words of the two ill-used men. Some of the men of the town said
that the two pilgrims were outlandish and bedlamite men, but Hopeful took
courage to reprove some of the foremost of the mob. Till, at last, when
Faithful was at the stake, it was all that his companions could do to
keep back Hopeful from leaping up on the burning pile and embracing the
expiring man. And then, when He who overrules