off in this world.  They will not laugh with all their heart till they laugh where He now laughs.  Then it will be said of them, too, that they began to be merry.  ’What was the matter with you that you did laugh in your sleep last night? asked Christiana of Mercy in the morning.  I suppose you were in a dream.  So I was, said Mercy, but are you sure that I laughed?  Yes, you laughed heartily; but, prithee, Mercy, tell me thy dream.  Well, I dreamed that I was in a solitary place and all alone, and was there bemoaning the hardness of my heart, when methought I saw one coming with wings towards me.  So he came directly to me, and said, Mercy, what aileth thee?  Now, when he heard my complaint, he said, Peace be to thee.  He also wiped mine eyes with his handkerchief, and clad me in silver and gold; he put a chain about my neck also, and earrings in mine ears, and a beautiful crown upon my head.  So he went up.  I followed him till we came to a golden gate; and I thought I saw your husband there.  But did I laugh?  Laugh! ay, and well you might, to see yourself so well.’

But to return and begin again.  Goodwill, who opened the gate, was, as we saw, a person of a very grave and commanding aspect; so much so, that in his sudden joy our pilgrim was a good deal overawed as he looked on the countenance of the man who stood in the gate, and it was some time afterwards before he understood why he wore such a grave and almost sad aspect.  But afterwards, as he went up the way, and sometimes returned in thought to the wicket-gate, he came to see very good reason why the keeper of that gate looked as he did look.  The site and situation of the gate, for one thing, was of itself enough to banish all light-mindedness from the man who was stationed there.  For the gatehouse stood just above the Slough of Despond, and that itself filled the air of the place with a dampness and a depression that could be felt.  And then out of the downward windows of the gate, the watcher’s eye always fell on the City of Destruction in the distance, and on her sister cities sitting like her daughters round about her.  And that also made mirth and hilarity impossible at that gate.  And then the kind of characters who came knocking all hours of the day and the night at that gate.  Goodwill never saw a happy face or heard a cheerful voice from one year’s end to the other.  And when any one so far forgot himself as to put on an untimely confidence and self-satisfaction, the gatekeeper would soon put him through such questions as quickly sobered him if he had anything at all of the root of the matter in him.  Terror, horror, despair, remorse, chased men and women up to that gate.  They would often fall before his threshold more dead than alive.  And then, after the gate was opened and the pilgrims pulled in, the gate had only opened on a path of such painfulness, toil, and terrible risk, that at whatever window Goodwill looked out, he always saw enough to make him and keep him