from the man who was stationed there. For the gatehouse stood just above
the Slough of Despond, and that itself filled the air of the place with a
dampness and a depression that could be felt. And then out of the
downward windows of the gate, the watcher's eye always fell on the City
of Destruction in the distance, and on her sister cities sitting like her
daughters round about her. And that also made mirth and hilarity
impossible at that gate. And then the kind of characters who came
knocking all hours of the day and the night at that gate. Goodwill never
saw a happy face or heard a cheerful voice from one year's end to the
other. And when any one so far forgot himself as to put on an untimely
confidence and self-satisfaction, the gatekeeper would soon put him
through such questions as quickly sobered him if he had anything at all
of the root of the matter in him. Terror, horror, despair, remorse,
chased men and women up to that gate. They would often fall before his
threshold more dead than alive. And then, after the gate was opened and
the pilgrims pulled in, the gate had only opened on a path of such
painfulness, toil, and terrible risk, that at whatever window Goodwill
looked out, he always saw enough to make him and keep him a grave, if not
a sad, man. It was, as he sometimes said, his meat and his drink to keep
the gate open for pilgrims; but the class of men who came calling
themselves pilgrims; the condition they came in; the past, that in spite
of all both he and they could do, still came in through his gate after
them, and went up all the way with them; their ignorance of the way, on
which he could only start them; the multitudes who started, and the
handfuls who held on; the many who for a time ran well, but afterwards
left their bones to bleach by the wayside; and all the impossible-to-be-
told troubles, dangers, sorrows, shipwrecks that certainly lay before the
most steadfast and single-hearted pilgrim--all that was more than enough
to give the man at the gate his grave and anxious aspect.