blood, "Why, is this
Christian's wife? What! and going on pilgrimage too? It glads my heart!
Good man! How joyful will he be when he shall see her and her children
enter after him in at the gates into the city!" He would have been
hacked a hundred times worse than he was before the widow of Christian,
and the mother of his children, would have seen anything but the manliest
beauty in a young soldier who could salute an old woman in that way. It
gladdened her heart to hear him, you may be sure, as much as it gladdened
his heart to see her. And that was the reason that she actually set
Greatheart himself aside, and left her children under this young man's
sword and shield. "I would also entreat you to have an eye to my
children," she said. Young men, has any dying mother committed her
children, if you at any time see them faint, to you? Have you ever
spoken so comfortably to any poor widow about her sainted husband that
she has passed by some of our foremost citizens, and has astonished and
offended her lawyers by putting a stripling like you into the
trusteeship? Did ever any dying mother say to you that she had seen you
to be so true-hearted at all times that she entreated you to have an eye
to her children? Speaking at this point for myself, I would rather see
my son so trusted at such an hour by such a woman than I would see him
the Chancellor of Her Majesty's Exchequer, or the Governor of the Bank of
England. And so to-night would you.

STANDFAST

"So stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved."--_Paul_.

In his supplementary picture of Standfast John Bunyan is seen at his very
best, both as a religious teacher and as an English author. On the
Enchanted Ground Standfast is set before us with extraordinary insight,
sagacity, and wisdom; and then in the terrible river he is set before us
with an equally extraordinary rapture and transport; while, in all that,
Bunyan composes in English of a strength and a beauty and a music in
which he positively surpasses himself. Just before he closes his great
book John Bunyan rises up and once more puts forth his very fullest
strength, both as a minister of religion and as a classical writer, when
he takes Standfast down into that river which that pilgrim tells us has
been such a terror to so many, and the thought of which has so often
affrighted himself.

When Greatheart and his charge were almost at the end of the Enchanted
Ground, so we read, they per