midst of a game of cat, and had struck the peg one blow from the hole, he heard a voice from the sky saying, " Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell ? " and looking up he saw the Lord Jesus gazing down upon him, " as being very hotly displeased." The thought that the steeple might 'fall and crush him in his sins drove him in a panic of fear from the door of the bell- tower, where he stood to look on at the ringing. Having found in the Bible a passage concerning faith, which gave him comfort, he was seized with the longing to try to work a miracle. " Nay, one day," he says in that wonderful simple diction which bites into the memory the pictures of his struggle, — " one day as I was between Elstow and Bed- ford, the temptation was hot upon me to try if I had Faith, by doing of some Miracle ; which Miracle at that time was this ; I must say to the Puddles that were in the horse- pads, Be dry ; and to the dry places, Be you the Puddles:' But just as he was about to utter the words, the awful fear that his command might be unheeded and himself proved faithless and a castaway, held his lips sealed. His strained imagination peopled the air with warning or malevolent presences. Once he turned on the highroad because he thought he heard a man calling behind him from a great distance, " Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you." As he sat on a street bench in Bedford the very tiles on the houses seemed to point at him and mock him. He began to be tormented by insane temptations to blasphemy and idolatry, and envied the beasts of the field because, by reason of their low estate, they were incapable of sin. By one of those vigorous unforgettable figures which illumine the pages of Grace Abounding, he com- pares himself while in this state of terrified obsession to a little child seized by a gypsy and carried off, frightened and weeping, to a strange people.
Even so robust a nature as Bunyan's could not long en- dure such a strain. He had the good fortune to meet with
