Bedford was thirteen miles away, and the constable would probably wait till the morning to set out for the prison which was to be Bunyan's home for twelve long years, to which he went carrying, he says, the "peace of God along with me, and His comfort in my poor soul." CHAPTER V. A long-standing tradition has identified Bunyan's place of imprisonment with a little corporation lock-up-house, some fourteen feet square, picturesquely perched on one of the mid-piers of the many-arched mediaeval bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse at Bedford, and as Mr. Froude has said, has "furnished a subject for pictures," both of pen and pencil, "which if correct would be extremely affecting." Unfortunately, however, for the lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not "correct," but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a desire to heap contumely on Bunyan's enemies by exaggerating the severity of his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment. Being arrested by the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan's place of incarceration was naturally the county gaol. There he undoubtedly passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there the royal warrant for his release found him "a prisoner in the common gaol for our county of Bedford." But though far different from the pictures which writers, desirous of exhibiting the sufferings of the Puritan confessor in the most telling form, have drawn--if not "a damp and dreary cell" into which "a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his confinement together,"--"the common gaol" of Bedford must have been a sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in the open-air in unrestricted freedom. Prisons in those days, and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places. A century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as "an uncomfortable and close prison." Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment, makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English gaols, some of them even unto death. Bad as it must have been to be a prisoner, as far as his own testimony goes, there is no evidence that his imprisonment, though varying in its strictness with his various gaolers, was aggravated by any special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, "it is unlikely that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships than were absolutely inevitable."