ry place, yet enters no
farther than the door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape
Tyburn and Banbury, he dies a beggar."

Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of John
Bunyan. As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearing
boy, as his father doubtless was before him. "It was my delight," says
he, "to be taken captive by the devil. I had few equals, both for
cursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming." Yet, in his ignorance
and darkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the
reproaches of conscience. He was scared, even in childhood, with
dreams of hell and apparitions of devils. Troubled with fears of
eternal fire and the malignant demons who fed it in the regions of
despair, he says that he often wished either that there was no hell,
or that he had been born a devil himself, that he might be a tormentor
rather than one of the tormented.

At an early age he appears to have married. His wife was as poor as
himself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoon
between them; but she brought with her two books on religious
subjects, the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of
influence on his mind. He went to church regularly, adored the priest
and all things pertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun
with superstition." On one occasion a sermon was preached against the
breach of the Sabbath by sports or labor, which struck him at the
moment as especially designed for himself; but by the time he had
finished his dinner he was prepared to "shake it out of his mind, and
return to his sports and gaming."

One day, while standing in the street, cursing and blaspheming, he met
with a reproof which startled him. The woman of the house in front of
which the wicked young tinker was standing, herself, as he remarks, "a
very loose, ungodly wretch," protested that his horrible profanity
made her tremble; that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing she
had ever heard, and able to spoil all the youth of the town who came
in his company. Struck by this wholly unexpected rebuke, he at once
abandoned the practice of swearing; although previously he tells us
that "he had never known how to speak, unless he put an oath before
and another behind."

His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of
the gospel is at once curious and instructive. He deals honestly with
himself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesse