Bunyan’s military career, wherever passed and under whatever standard, was very short.  The civil war was drawing near the end of its first stage when he enlisted.  He had only been a soldier a few months when the battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, was fought, June 14, 1645.  Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert, Sept. 10th.  Three days later Montrose was totally defeated at Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to relieve Chester, Charles shut himself up in Oxford.  The royal garrisons yielded in quick succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were disbanded, and the first act in the great national tragedy having come to a close, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker’s work at the paternal forge.  His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be mentioned, lived all through his famous son’s twelve years’ imprisonment, witnessed his growing celebrity as a preacher and a writer, and died in the early part of 1676, just when John Bunyan was passing through his last brief period of durance, which was to give birth to the work which has made him immortal.

CHAPTER II.

It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan’s return home from his short experience of a soldier’s life, that he took the step which, more than any other, influences a man’s future career for good or for evil.  The young tinker married.  With his characteristic disregard of all facts or dates but such as concern his spiritual history, Bunyan tells us nothing about the orphan girl he made his wife.  Where he found her, who her parents were, where they were married, even her christian name, were all deemed so many irrelevant details.  Indeed the fact of his marriage would probably have been passed over altogether but for the important bearing it hid on his inner life.  His “mercy,” as he calls it, “was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly,” and who, though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they “came together as poor as poor might be,” as “poor as howlets,” to adopt his own simile, “without so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt” them, yet brought with her to the Elstow cottage two religious books, which had belonged to her father, and which he “had left her when he died.”  These books were “The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven,” the work of Arthur Dent, the puritan incumbent of Shoebury, in Essex—­“wearisomely heavy and theologically narrow,” writes Dr. Brown—­and “The Practise of Piety,” by Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as with churchmen.  Together with these books, the young wife brought the still more powerful influence of a religious training, and the memory of a holy example, often telling her young graceless husband “what a godly man her father was, and how he would reprove and correct vice both in his house and amongst his neighbours, and what