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 honeysuckles, must be much what they were in Bunyan’s days.  A village street, with detached cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at the upper end of the old “Moot Hall,” a quaint brick and timber building, with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses—­“the scene,” writes Dr. Brown “of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of village life.”  The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it so hard to give up, and in “tip-cat,” and the other innocent games which his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as “ungodly practices.”  One may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his “cat” that memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which rebuked him for his sins, and “returned desperately to his sport again.”  On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so vividly depicted by Bunyan in his “Grace Abounding.”  On entering every object speaks of Bunyan.  The pulpit—­if it has survived the recent restoration—­is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then “Parson” of Elstow, preached the sermon which first awoke his sleeping conscience.  The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and mother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, on April 14, 1654.  An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy when he “went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost counting all things holy that were therein contained.”  The five bells which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted, the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring.  The rough flagged floor, “all worn and broken