Elstow, a village about one mile south of Bedford, was Bunyan's birthplace. The house is still pointed out, though a new front has been put into it, and it is a very small building, suitable to the tinker's humble estate. The village-green where he played is near by, alongside the churchyard wall; the church, which has been little changed, stands on the farther side of the yard, with a massive tower at the north-western angle, looking more like a fortress than a religious edifice. The bells are still there which Bunyan used to ring, and they also point out "Bunyan's Pew" inside, though the regularity of his attendance is not vouched for, as he says "absenting himself from church" was one of his offences during the greater part of his life. He married early and in poor circumstances, the young couple "not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt them both," though he considered it among his mercies that he was led "to light upon a wife of godly parentage." He says that a marked change in his mental condition suddenly began while playing a game of "tip-cat" on Sunday afternoon on the village-green, having listened in the morning to a sermon upon Sabbath-breaking. His conscience smote him; he abandoned the game, leaving his cat upon the ground, and then began his great spiritual struggle. He joined the Baptists, and began preaching, for at length, after many tribulations, he says, "the burden fell from off his back." He was persecuted, and committed to Bedford jail, where he remained (with short intervals of parole) for about twelve years. Here he wrote what Macaulay declares to be incomparably the finest allegory in the English language--the _Pilgrim's Progress_. He was a voluminous author, having written some sixty tracts and books. Finally pardoned in 1672, he became pastor of the Bedford meeting-house, and afterwards escaped molestation; he preached in all parts of the kingdom, especially in London, where he died at the age of sixty, having caught cold in a heavy storm while going upon an errand of mercy in 1688. His great work will live as long as the Anglo-Saxon race endures. "That wonderful book," writes Macaulay, "while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.... Every reader knows the strait and narrow path as well as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were--that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another; and this miracle the tinker has wrought." [Illustration: NORTH DOOR, ELSTOW CHURCH.] WOBURN ABBEY.