When his breath failed him he stopped, but he dared not look back. He
fancied that the birds would pursue him, that the dead man had undone
his chain and was perhaps hurrying behind him, and no doubt the gibbet
itself was descending the hill, running after the dead man; he feared to
see these things if he turned his head.

When he had somewhat recovered his breath he resumed his flight.

To account for facts does not belong to childhood. He received
impressions which were magnified by terror, but he did not link them
together in his mind, nor form any conclusion on them. He was going on,
no matter how or where; he ran in agony and difficulty as one in a
dream. During the three hours or so since he had been deserted, his
onward progress, still vague, had changed its purpose. At first it was a
search; now it was a flight. He no longer felt hunger nor cold--he felt
fear. One instinct had given place to another. To escape was now his
whole thought--to escape from what? From everything. On all sides life
seemed to enclose him like a horrible wall. If he could have fled from
all things, he would have done so. But children know nothing of that
breaking from prison which is called suicide. He was running. He ran on
for an indefinite time; but fear dies with lack of breath.

All at once, as if seized by a sudden accession of energy and
intelligence, he stopped. One would have said he was ashamed of running
away. He drew himself up, stamped his foot, and, with head erect, looked
round. There was no longer hill, nor gibbet, nor flights of crows. The
fog had resumed possession of the horizon. The child pursued his way: he
now no longer ran but walked. To say that meeting with a corpse had made
a man of him would be to limit the manifold and confused impression
which possessed him. There was in his impression much more and much
less. The gibbet, a mighty trouble in the rudiment of comprehension,
nascent in his mind, still seemed to him an apparition; but a trouble
overcome is strength gained, and he felt himself stronger. Had he been
of an age to probe self, he would have detected within him a thousand
other germs of meditation; but the reflection of children is shapeless,
and the utmost they feel is the bitter aftertaste of that which, obscure
to them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child has
the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the
distant fading boundaries which amplify painfu