CHAPTER XVII--FIVE PICKT MEN.
'I took wise men and known and made them captains.'-- _Moses_.
John Bunyan never lost his early love for a soldier's life any more than he ever forgot the rare delights of his bell-ringing days.

John Bunyan, all his days, never saw a bell-rope that his fingers did not tingle, and he never saw a soldier in uniform without instinctively shouldering his youthful musket.

Bunyan was one of those rare men who are of imagination all compact; and consequently it is that all his books are full of the scenes, the occupations, and the experiences of his early days.

Not that he says very much, in as many words, about what happened to him in the days when he was a soldier; it is only once in all his many books that he says that when he was a soldier such and such a thing happened to him.

At the same time, all his books bear the impress of his early days upon them; and as for this special book of Bunyan's now open before us, it is full from board to board of the strife and the din of his early battles.
The _Holy War_ is just John Bunyan's soldierly life spiritualised--spiritualised and so worked up into this fine English Classic.
Well, then, after Mansoul was taken and reduced, the victorious Prince determined so to occupy the town with His soldiers that it should never again either be taken by force from without, or ever again revolt by weakness or by fear from within.