ildren's hands, and it is as a frontlet between their eyes. He writes
its names upon the doorposts of his house, and makes pictures out of it
upon his gates. Now, John Bunyan was a born Englishman in his liking for
a family tree. He had no such tree himself--scarcely so much as a
bramble bush; but, all the same, let the tinker take his pen in hand, and
the pedigrees and genealogies of all his pilgrims are sure to be set
forth as much as if they were to form the certificates that those
pilgrims were to hand in at the gate.

Feeble-mind, then, was of an old, a well-rooted and a wide-spread race.
The county of Indecision was full of that ancient stock. They had
intermarried in-and-in also till their small stature, their whitely look,
the droop of their eye, and their weak leaky speech all made them to be
easily recognised wherever they went. It was Feeble-mind's salvation
that Death had knocked at his door every day from his youth up. He was
feeble in body as well as in mind; only the feebleness of his body had
put a certain strength into his mind; the only strength he ever showed,
indeed, was the strength that had its roots in a weak constitution at
which sickness and death struck their dissolving blows every day. To
escape death, both the first and the second death, any man with a
particle of strength left would run with all his might; and Feeble-mind
had strength enough somewhere among his weak joints to make him say, "But
this I have resolved on, to wit, to run when I can, to go when I cannot
run, and to creep when I cannot go. As to the main, I am fixed!"

2. At the Wicket Gate pilgrim Feeble-mind met with nothing but the
kindest and the most condescending entertainment. It was the gatekeepers
way to become all things to all men. The gatekeeper's nature was all in
his name; for he was all Goodwill together. No kind of pilgrim ever came
wrong to Goodwill. He never found fault with any. Only let them knock
and come in and he will see to all the rest. The way is full of all the
gatekeeper's kind words and still kinder actions. Every several pilgrim
has his wager with all the rest that no one ever got such kindness at the
gate as he got. And even Feeble-mind gave the gatekeeper this
praise--"The Lord of the place," he said, "did entertain me freely.
Neither objected he against my weakly looks nor against my feeble mind.
But he gave me such things as were necessary for my journey, and bade me
hope to the e