n aching lump of prostration I felt when it was over. The day I
fainted after winning a steeplechase, he turned a bucket of cold water
over me, and as this roused me into a tingling vitality of pain, he was
quite proud of his treatment, and told me nothing brought a really good
horse round after a hard day like a bucket of clean water. And (so much
are we the creatures of our conditions!) I remember feeling something
approaching to satisfaction at the reflection that I had "gone till I
dropped," and had been brought round after the manner of the
best-conducted stables.

It was not that that made Jem and me run away. (For we did run away.)
Overstrain and collapse, ill-usage short of torture, hard living and
short commons, one got a certain accustomedness to, according to the
merciful law which within certain limits makes a second nature for us
out of use and wont. The one pain that knew no pause, and allowed of no
revival, the evil that overbore us, mind and body, was the evil of
constant dread. Upon us little boys fear lay always, and the terror of
it was that it was uncertain. What would come next, and from whom, we
never knew.

It was I who settled we should run away. I did it the night that Jem
gave in, and would do nothing but cry noiselessly into his sleeve and
wish he was dead. So I settled it and told Lorraine. I wanted him to
come too, but he would not. He pretended that he did not care, and he
said he had nowhere to go to. But he got into Snuffy's very own room at
daybreak whilst we stood outside and heard him snoring; and very loud he
must have snored too, for I could hear my heart thumping so I should not
have thought I could have heard anything else. And Lorraine took the
back-door key off the drawers, and let us out, and took it back again.
He feared nothing. There was a walnut-tree by the gate, and Jem said,
"Suppose we do our faces like gipsies, so that nobody may know us." (For
Jem was terribly frightened of being taken back.) So we found some old
bits of peel and rubbed our cheeks, but we dared not linger long over
it, and I said, "We'd better get further on, and we can hide if we hear
steps or wheels." So we took each other's hands, and for nearly a mile
we ran as hard as we could go, looking back now and then over our
shoulders, like the picture of Christian and Hopeful running away from
the Castle of Giant Despair.

We were particularly afraid of the milkman, for milkmen drive about
early, and he