d Capital]

I can assure you, and tell no lie (as John Fry always used to say, when
telling his very largest), that I scrambled back to the mouth of that
pit as if the evil one had been after me. And sorely I repented now of
all my boyish folly, or madness it might well be termed, in venturing,
with none to help, and nothing to compel me, into that accursed valley.
Once let me get out, thinks I, and if ever I get in again, without being
cast in by neck and by crop, I will give our new-born donkey leave to
set up for my schoolmaster.

How I kept that resolution we shall see hereafter. It is enough for me
now to tell how I escaped from the den that night. First I sat down
in the little opening which Lorna had pointed out to me, and wondered
whether she had meant, as bitterly occurred to me, that I should run
down into the pit, and be drowned, and give no more trouble. But in less
than half a minute I was ashamed of that idea, and remembered how she
was vexed to think that even a loach should lose his life. And then
I said to myself, "Now surely she would value me more than a thousand
loaches; and what she said must be quite true about the way out of this
horrible place."

Therefore I began to search with the utmost care and diligence, although
my teeth were chattering, and all my bones beginning to ache with the
chilliness and the wetness. Before very long the moon appeared, over the
edge of the mountain, and among the trees at the top of it; and then I
espied rough steps, and rocky, made as if with a sledge-hammer, narrow,
steep, and far asunder, scooped here and there in the side of the
entrance, and then round a bulge of the cliff, like the marks upon a
great brown loaf, where a hungry child has picked at it. And higher
up, where the light of the moon shone broader upon the precipice, there
seemed to be a rude broken track, like the shadow of a crooked stick
thrown upon a house-wall.

Herein was small encouragement; and at first I was minded to lie down
and die; but it seemed to come amiss to me. God has His time for all
of us; but He seems to advertise us when He does not mean to do it.
Moreover, I saw a movement of lights at the head of the valley, as if
lanthorns were coming after me, and the nimbleness given thereon to my
heels was in front of all meditation.

Straightway I set foot in the lowest stirrup (as I might almost call
it), and clung to the rock with my nails, and worked to make a jump into
the secon