went before thee, enter this celestial city." And so on.

1. Now, to begin with, you will have noticed the way in which Christiana
was prepared for the entrance of Secret into her house. She was a widow.
She sat alone in that loneliness which only widows know and understand.
More than lonely, she was very miserable. "Mark this," says the author
on the margin, "you that are churls to your godly relations." For this
widow felt sure that her husband had been taken from her because of her
cruel behaviour to him. Her past unnatural carriages toward her husband
now rent the very caul of her heart in sunder. And, again and again,
about that same time strange dreams would sometimes visit her. Dreams
such as this. She would see her husband in a place of bliss with a harp
in his hand, standing and playing upon it before One that sat on a throne
with a rainbow round His head. She saw also as if he bowed his head with
his face to the paved work that was under the Prince's feet, saying, I
heartily thank my Lord and King for bringing me to this place. You will
easily see how ready this lone woman was with all that for his entrance
who knocked and said, Peace be to this house, and handed her a letter of
perfume from her husband's King. Then you will have remarked also some
of the things this visitor from on high said to her of the place whence
he had come. He told her, to begin with, how they sometimes talked about
her in his country. She thought that she was a lonely and forgotten
widow, and that no one cared what became of her. But her visitor assured
her she was quite wrong in thinking that. He had often himself heard her
name mentioned in conversation above; and the most hopeful reports, he
told her, were circulated from door to door that she was actually all but
started on the upward way. Yes, he said, and we have a place prepared
for you on the strength of these reports, a place among the immortals
close beside your husband. And all that, as you will not wonder, was the
beginning of Christiana's secret life. After that morning she never