child.  She had loved too long to look on her first-born as still a child.  When he went at any time for a season out of her sight, she had never followed him with her knowledge of the world; she had never prevented him with an awakened and an anxious imagination; till now she had got him home with no rest in his bones because of his sin.  And then she began to cry too late, O naughty boy, and, O careless mother, what shall I do for my son!

2.  “That food, to wit, that fruit,” said Mr. Skill, “is even the most hurtful of all.  It is the fruit of Beelzebub’s orchard.”  So it is.  There is no fruit that hurts at all like that fruit.  How it hurts at the time, we see in Matthew’s sick-room; and how it hurts all a man’s after days we see in Jacob, and in Job, and in David, and in a thousand sin-sick souls of whose psalms of remorse and repentance the world cannot contain all the books that should be written.  “And yet I marvel,” said the indignant physician, “that none did warn him of it; many have died thereof.”  Oh if I could but get the ears of all the sons of godly fathers and mothers who are beginning to tamper with Beelzebub’s orchard-trees, I feel as if I could warn them to-night, and out of this text, of what they are doing!  I have known so many who have died thereof.  Oh if I could but save them in time from those gripes of conscience that will pull them to pieces on the softest and the most fragrant bed that shall ever be made for them on earth!  It will be well with them if they do not lie down torn to pieces on their bed in hell, and curse the day they first plashed down into their youthful hands the vine of Sodom.  Both the way to hell and the way to heaven are full of many kinds of hurtful fruits; but that species of fruit that poor misguided Matthew plucked and ate after he had well passed the gate that is at the head of the way is, by all men’s testimony, by far the most hurtful of all forbidden fruits.

3.  The whole scene in Matthew’s sick-room reads, after all, less like a skilful invention than a real occurrence.  Inventive and realistic as John Bunyan is, there is surely something here that goes beyond even his genius.  After making all allowance for Bunyan’s unparalleled powers of creation and narration, I am inclined to think, the oftener I read it, that, after all, we have not so much John Bunyan here as very Nature herself.  Yes; John Gifford surely was Mr. Skill.  Sister Bosworth surely was Matthew’s mother.  And Matthew himself was Sister Bosworth’s eldest son, while one John Bunyan, a travelling tinker, was busy with his furnaces and his soldering-irons in Dame Bosworth’s kitchen.  Young Bunyan, with all his blackguardism, had never plashed down Beelzebub’s orchard.  He swears he never did, and we are bound to believe him.  But young Bosworth had been tampering with the forbidden fruit, and Gifford saw at a glance what was wrong.  John Gifford was first an officer in the Royalist