The notion came to me one warm autumn afternoon, as I was reading "Grace Abounding."
From the first page I struck up a living friendship with the Bedford tinker, though he had been in heaven for near two hundred years. I understood him as he talked aloud to himself and peered within to discover who and what was this John Bunyan inside him. I liked too—the more so as it was so new in print and from the mind of some-one-else—the careful detail with which he told of his earthly outward life: his descent, his lowly parentage, his school, his early days, though I could have wished for details of his Aunt Jaels and Uncle Simeons. These did not lack when he talked of his "inside" life, and told me (who knew) of his childhood's "fearful dreams" and "dreadful visions" and "thoughts of the fearful Torments of Hell fire," because of which "in the midst of my many Sports and Childish Vanities, amidst my vain Companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted." Why should not I tell a like story of my soul day by day, detail by detail?
The notion rolled through me like a tide. I closed the book, sprang up, shut my eyes, and walked round and round the room in my excitement. Today, this moment, I would begin. Then as I turned my mind to practical details—the book I should write it in, the hiding-place for the book—hesitations appeared. Wasn't it a bit funny? Did other people do it? Why, yes: John Bunyan was "other people" right enough, and a good Christian too. And I remembered that I had heard somewhere before of a man who wrote down the story of his life. In a few seconds I placed my man. Poor old Robinson Crewjoe.
I ran into the kitchen.
"Mrs. Cheese, you know Robinson Crewjoe you told me about, didn't you say you could read about it all in a book he'd written himself?"
"'E wrote it pon a bit buke 'e vound on the Wreck, so's 'e shidden virget it, I reckon, or so's ither volk cude rade it arterwards—"
"Yes, but when did he write it?"
"Ivry day, avore goin' to bed nights. Ivrythin' 'e'd been doin' that day. Leastways that's what my ol' Uncle Zam ollers did, who kep' a buke of the zame zort."
"What was it like? Please tell me about Uncle Sam's book."