when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses--"the scene," writes Dr. Brown
"of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of
village life." The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little
altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of
the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it
so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which
his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices." One
may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his "cat" that
memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which
rebuked him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his sport again."
On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a
fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed
at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached
bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so
vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding." On entering every
object speaks of Bunyan. The pulpit--if it has survived the recent
restoration--is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then "Parson"
of Elstow, preached the sermon which first awoke his sleeping conscience.
The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and
mother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-
loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth,
on April 14, 1654. An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of
thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the
tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy
when he "went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost
counting all things holy that were therein contained." The five bells
which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted,
the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring. The
rough flagged floor, "all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of
generations of ringers," remains undisturbed. One cannot see the door,