further diminished by sale.  The field already referred to, known as “Bonyon’s End,” was sold by “Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer,” son of William Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepers of a small roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-baked bread and home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into trouble with the petty local courts of the day.  Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan’s father, was born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603, exactly a month before the great queen passed away.  The mother of the immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a native of Elstow and only a few months his junior.  The details of her mother’s will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow, prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan’s latest and most complete biographer, the 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