is own
neat little lane into the rough road on which our two pilgrims were
staggering upward, he felt somewhat ashamed to be seen in their company.
And I do not wonder. For a greater contrast you would not have seen on
any road in all that country that day. He was at your very first sight
of him a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. A little over-dressed
perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two rather battered but
otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older than he, took the
liberty of first accosting him. "Brisk" is his biographer's description
of him. Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have
been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that
moment. But those two tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed,
broken-hearted old men had been, as an old author says, so emptied from
vessel to vessel--they had had a life of such sloughs and stiff
climbs--they had been in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness so
often--that it was no wonder that their dandiacal companion walked on a
little ahead of them. 'Gentlemen,' his fine clothes and his cane and his
head in the air all said to his two somewhat disreputable-looking fellow-
travellers,--"Gentlemen, you be utter strangers to me: I know you not.
And, besides, I take my pleasure in walking alone, even more a great deal
than in company, unless I like it better." But all his society manners,
and all his costly and well-kept clothes, and all his easy and
self-confident airs did not impose upon the two wary old pilgrims. They
had seen too much of the world, and had been too long mixing among all
kinds of pilgrims, young and old, true and false, to be easily imposed
upon. Besides, as one could see from their weather-beaten faces, and
their threadbare garments, they had found the upward way so dreadfully
difficult that they both felt a real apprehension as to the future of
this light-hearted and light-headed youth. "You may find some difficulty
at the gate," somewhat bluntly broke in the oldest of the two pilgrims on
their young comrade. "I shall, no doubt, do at the gate as other good
people do," replied the young gentleman briskly. "But what have you to
show at the gate that may cause that the gate be opened to you?" "Why, I
know my Lord's will, and I have been a good liver all my days, and I pay
every man his own. I pray, moreover, and I fast. I pay tithes, and give
alms, and have left my country for whither I am goin