Bunyan had some providential escapes during his early life. Once, he
fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse,
near Bedford, and each time he was narrowly saved from drowning. One
day, an adder crossed his path. He stunned it with a stick, then forced
open its mouth with a stick and plucked out the tongue, which he
supposed to be the sting, with his fingers; “by which act,” he says,
“had not God been merciful unto me, I might, by my desperateness, have
brought myself to an end.” If this, indeed, were an adder, and not a
harmless snake, his escape from the fangs was more remarkable than he
himself was aware of. A circumstance, which was likely to impress him
more deeply, occurred in the eighteenth year of his age, when, being a
soldier in the Parliament’s army, he was drawn out to go to the siege of
Leicester, in 1645. One of the same company wished to go in his stead;
Bunyan consented to exchange with him, and this volunteer substitute,
standing sentinel one day at the siege, was shot through the head with a
musket-ball. “This risk,” Sir Walter Scott observes, “was one somewhat
resembling the escape of Sir Roger de Coverley, in an action at
Worcester, who was saved from the slaughter of that action, by having
been absent from the field.”--_Southey._