with the hobnailed boots of generations of ringers,” remains undisturbed.  One cannot see the door, set in its solid masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing in it, after conscience, “beginning to be tender,” told him that “such practice was but vain,” but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of seeing others ring, hoping that, “if a bell should fall,” he could “slip out” safely “behind the thick walls,” and so “be preserved notwithstanding.”  Behind the church, on the south side, stand some picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones, which may have given Bunyan the first idea of “the very stately Palace, the name of which was Beautiful.”

The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its site has passed away.  That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655) after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still standing in the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of all interest.

From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the subject of our biography himself.  The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless.  Even if Bunyan’s inquiry of his father “whether the family was of Israelitish descent or no,” which has been so strangely pressed into the service of the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the decided negative with which his question was met—­“he told me, ’No, we were not’”—­would, one would have thought, have settled the point.  But some fictions die hard.  However low the family had sunk, so that in his own words, “his father’s house was of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,” “of a low and inconsiderable generation,” the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in Bunyan’s native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it.  And his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute among their village neighbours.  Bunyan seems to be describing his own father and his wandering life when he speaks of “an honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his family.”  He and his wife were also careful with a higher care that their children should be properly educated.  “Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents,” writes Bunyan, “it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write.”  If we accept the evidence