the prescription papers of his doctors, and we know that he got all his
perfect English from his English Bible. And then he got his humour and
his pathos out of his own deep and tender heart. The God of all grace
gave a great gift to the English-speaking world and to the Church of
Christ in all lands when He created and converted John Bunyan, and put it
into his head and his heart to compose _The Pilgrim's Progress_. His
heart-affecting page on the slough has been wetted with the tears of
thousands of its readers, and their tears have been mingled with smiles
as they read their own sin and misery, and the never-to-be-forgotten time
and place where their sin and misery first found them out, all told so
recognisably, so pathetically, and so amusingly almost to laughableness
in the passage upon the slough. We see the ocean of scum and filth
pouring down into the slough through the subterranean sewers of the City
of Destruction and of the Town of Stupidity, which lies four degrees
beyond the City of Destruction, and from many other of the houses and
haunts of men. We see His Majesty's sappers and miners at their wits'
end how to cope with the deluges of pollution that pour into this slough
that they have been ordained to drain and dry up. For ages and ages the
royal surveyors have been laying out all their skill on this slough. More
cartloads than you could count of the best material for filling up a
slough have been shot into it, and yet you would never know that so much
as a single labourer had emptied his barrow here. True, excellent
stepping-stones have been laid across the slough by skilful engineers,
but they are always so slippery with the scum and slime of the slough,
that it is only now and then that a traveller can keep his feet upon
them. Altogether, our author's picture of the Slough of Despond is such
a picture that no one who has seen it can ever forget it. But better
than reading the best description of the slough is to see certain well-
known pilgrims trying to cross it. Mr. Fearing at the Slough of Despond
was a tale often told at the tavern suppers of that country. Never