beside. Poor child, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou
must suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I
cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee. O, the thoughts of the
hardships my blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces." He
seemed to himself like a man pulling down his house on his wife and
children's head, and yet he felt, "I must do it; O, I must do it." He
was also, he tells us, at one time, being but "a young prisoner," greatly
troubled by the thoughts that "for aught he could tell," his
"imprisonment might end at the gallows," not so much that he dreaded
death as that he was apprehensive that when it came to the point, even if
he made "a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder," he might play the
coward and so do discredit to the cause of religion. "I was ashamed to
die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this." The
belief that his imprisonment might be terminated by death on the
scaffold, however groundless, evidently weighed long on his mind. The
closing sentences of his third prison book, "Christian Behaviour,"
published in 1663, the second year of his durance, clearly point to such
an expectation. "Thus have I in few words written to you before I die,
. . . not knowing the shortness of my life, nor the hindrances that
hereafter I may have of serving my God and you." The ladder of his
apprehensions was, as Mr. Froude has said, "an imaginary ladder," but it
was very real to Bunyan. "Oft I was as if I was on the ladder with a
rope about my neck." The thought of it, as his autobiography shows,
caused him some of his deepest searchings of heart, and noblest ventures
of faith. He was content to suffer by the hangman's hand if thus he
might have an opportunity of addressing the crowd that he thought would
come to see him die. "And if it must be so, if God will but convert one
soul by my very last words, I shall not count my life thrown away or
lost." And even when hours of darkness came over his soul, and he was
tempted to question the reality of his Christian profession, and to doubt