remember that Bunyan’s own words expressly restrict this indulgence to the six months between the Autumn Assizes of 1661 and the Spring Assizes of 1662.  “Between these two assizes,” he says, “I had by my jailer some liberty granted me more than at the first.”  This liberty was certainly of the largest kind consistent with his character of a prisoner.  The church books show that he was occasionally present at their meetings, and was employed on the business of the congregation.  Nay, even his preaching, which was the cause of his imprisonment, was not forbidden.  “I followed,” he says, writing of this period, “my wonted course of preaching, taking all occasions that were put into my hand to visit the people of God.”  But this indulgence was very brief and was brought sharply to an end.  It was plainly irregular, and depended on the connivance of his jailer.  We cannot be surprised that when it came to the magistrates’ ears—­“my enemies,” Bunyan rather unworthily calls them—­they were seriously displeased.  Confounding Bunyan with the Fifth Monarchy men and other turbulent sectaries, they imagined that his visits to London had a political object, “to plot, and raise division, and make insurrections,” which, he honestly adds, “God knows was a slander.”  The jailer was all but “cast out of his place,” and threatened with an indictment for breach of trust, while his own liberty was so seriously “straitened” that he was prohibited even “to look out at the door.”  The last time Bunyan’s name appears as present at a church meeting is October 28, 1661, nor do we see it again till October 9, 1668, only four years before his twelve years term of imprisonment expired.

But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quite so narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, during the greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painful one, especially when spent, as it sometimes was, “under cruel and oppressive jailers.”  The enforced separation from his wife and children, especially his tenderly loved blind daughter, Mary, was a continually renewed anguish to his loving heart.  “The parting with them,” he writes, “hath often been to me as pulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should often have brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them; especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all beside.  Poor child, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou must suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee.  O, the thoughts of the hardships my blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.”  He seemed to himself like a man pulling down his house on his wife and children’s head, and yet he felt, “I must do it; O, I must do it.”  He was also,