It was _Christian’s_ fault: he simply wouldn’t be hurried. Stumbling along beside him over the difficult words, she was out of patience twenty times a day with his credulous, open-mouthed simplicity. He was no better than Wilfred and James who always believed every word that the coachman told them, or the gardener’s boy, or the chattering, black-eyed Frenchmen who came to the yard on Saturdays to sell onions. She had no patience with them or with conversational _Christian_, wasting his time and losing his way. Did he think that she, Laura, would have been taken in like that, over and over again, by _Vain Confidence_ and _Flatterer_ and _Mr. Worldly Wiseman_? Why, the very names were enough to put even the twins on their guard, and _Christian_ was grown-up! _Byways Meadow_—there she acknowledged that she too might have strayed: she hankered after little cross-country paths herself, though Nurse and Aunt Adela always insisted on the dull, dusty, put-on-your-gloves high-road; but she would never have pounded off to _Sinai_, or stood by the hour arguing and disputing and contradicting about unintelligible things like _Carnal Cogitations_ and _The Carcase of Religion_, long before she had got to heaven and found Mother. But though _Christian_ would go his own gait, and skipping was unsafe because the adventure were tucked away among the arguments like strawberries in a bed of leaves, he did at last bring her past the _Enchanted Ground_ (disappointingly unproductive of fairies) to the _Land of Beulah_ and a clear view of the _Cœlestial City_ itself. Absorbed Laura, curled-up by Gran’papa’s fire on that clear October morning, reading of the _Reflexion of the sun on the City_ (_for the City was of pure gold_) and dutifully looking up _Rev. xxi. 28_, had just stumbled upon a more marvellous heaven than even Bunyan drew, when the nursemaid, as it always happened, pounced upon her and brushed her and buttoned her and gloved her and stuck a hat upon her and hurried her off for a walk, too dazed to protest, with her head full of rivers of life and fruit trees and gates that were one pearl (like Mother’s ring) and strange, intoxicating, unpronounceable names—_the third, chalcedony, and the seventh, chrysolite, and the eighth, beryl_. She was far too absorbed to notice the way they went, and Wilfred and James were pelting each other with fallen leaves, and Nurse was leaning panting against the perambulator, before she realized that they had climbed the long Beech Hill Road that Nurse disliked because it was steep and lonely, but which, as the highest point of the highest village in a hilly county, did certainly satisfy Aunt Adela’s belief in fresh air.