'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' What a contrast those two men were to one another in the midst of that plain that day! Our pilgrim was full of the most laborious going; sighs and groans rose out of his heart at every step; and then his burden on his back, and his filthy, slimy rags all made him a picture such that it was to any man's credit and praise that he should stop to speak to him. And then, when our pilgrim looked up, he saw a gentleman standing beside him to whom he was ashamed to speak. For the gentleman had no burden on his back, and he did not go over the plain laboriously. There was not a spot or a speck, a rent or a wrinkle on all his fine raiment. He could not have been better appointed if he had just stepped out of the gate at the head of the way; they can wear no cleaner garments than his in the Celestial City itself. 'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' 'A burdened manner, indeed, as ever I think poor creature had. And whereas you ask me whither away, I tell you, sir, I am going to yonder wicket gate before me; for there, as I am informed, I shall be put into a way to be rid of my heavy burden.' 'Hast thou a wife and children?' Yes; he is ashamed to say that he has. But he confesses that he cannot to-day take the pleasure in them that he used to do. Since his sin so came upon him, he is sometimes as if he had neither wife nor child nor a house over his head. John Bunyan was of Samuel Rutherford's terrible experience,--that our sins and our sinfulness poison all our best enjoyments. We do not hear much of Rutherford's wife and children, and that, no doubt, for the sufficient reason that he gives us in his so open-minded letter. But Bunyan laments over his blind child with a lament worthy to stand beside the lament of David over Absalom, and again over Saul and Jonathan at Mount Gilboa. At the same time, John Bunyan often felt sore and sad at heart that he could not love and give all his heart to his wife and children as they deserved to be loved and to have all his heart. He often felt guilty as he looked on them and knew in himself that they did not have in him such a father as, God knew, he wished he was, or ever in this world could hope to be. 'Yes,' he said, 'but I cannot take the pleasure in them that I would. I am sometimes as if I had none. My sin sometimes drives me like a man bereft of his reason and clean demented.' 'Who bid thee go this way to be rid of thy burden? I beshrew him for his counsel. There is not a more troublesome and dangerous way in the world than this is to which he hath directed thee. And besides, though I used to have some of the same burden when I was young, not since I settled in that town,' pointing to the town of Carnal-Policy over the plain, 'have I been at any time troubled in that way.' And then he went on to describe and denounce the way to the