brings the water to my eyes also.  It is indeed a delicious piece of English prose.  If I were a professor of belles lettres instead of what I am, I would compel all my students, under pain of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till they could neither perpetrate nor tolerate bad English any more.  This camp-fire tale, told by an old soldier, about a troublesome young recruit and all his adventures, touches, surely, the high-water mark of sweet and undefiled English.  Greatheart was not the first soldier who could handle both the sword and the pen, and he has not been the last.  But not Caesar and not Napier themselves ever handled those two instruments better.

2.  Greatheart had just returned to his Master’s house from having seen Mr. Fearing safely through all his troubles and well over the river, when, behold, another caravan of pilgrims is ready for his convoy.  For Greatheart, you must know, was the Interpreter’s armed servant.  When at any time Greatheart was off duty, which in those days was but seldom, he took up his quarters again in the Interpreter’s house.  As he says himself, he came back from the river-side only to look out of the Interpreter’s window to see if there was any more work on the way for him to do.  And, as good luck would have it, as has been said, the guide was just come back from his adventures with Mr. Fearing when a pilgrim party, than which he had never seen one more to his mind, was introduced to him by his Master, the Interpreter.  “The Interpreter,” so we read at this point, “then called for a man-servant of his, one Greatheart, and bid him take sword, and helmet, and shield, and take these, my daughters,” said he, “and conduct them to the house called Beautiful, at which place they will rest next.  So he took his weapons and went before them, and the Interpreter said, God-speed.”

3.  Now I saw in my dream that they went on, and Greatheart went before them, so they came to the place where Christian’s burden fell off his back and tumbled into a sepulchre.  Here, then, they made a pause, and here also they blessed God.  “Now,” said Christiana, “it comes to my mind what was said to us at the gate; to wit, that we should have pardon by word and by deed.  What it is to have pardon by deed, Mr. Greatheart, I suppose you know; wherefore, if you please, let us hear your discourse thereof.”  “So then, to speak to the question,” said Greatheart.  You have all heard about the “question-day” at Highland communions.  That day is so called because questions that have arisen in the minds of “the men” in connection with doctrine and with experience are on that day set forth, debated out, and solved by much meditation and prayer; age, saintliness, doctrinal and experimental reading, and personal experience all making their contribution to the solution of the question in hand.  Just such a question, then, and handled in such a manner, was that question which whiled the way and cheated