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 had taken a runaway boy back to Crayshaw’s years before, and Snuffy gave him five shillings.  They said he once helped another boy to get away, but it was a big one, who gave him his gold watch.  He would do anything if you paid him.  Jem and I had each a little bundle in a handkerchief, but nothing in them that the milkman would have cared for.  We managed very well, for we got behind a wall when he went by, and I felt so much cheered up I thought we should get home that day, far as it was.  But when we got back into the road, I found that Jem was limping, for Snuffy had stamped on his foot when Jem had had it stuck out beyond the desk, when he was writing; and the running had made it worse, and at last he sat down by the roadside, and said I was to go on home and send back for him.  It was not very likely I would leave him to the chance of being pursued by Mr. Crayshaw; but there he sat, and I thought I never should have persuaded him to get on my back, for good-natured as he is, Jem is as obstinate as a pig.  But I said, “What’s the use of my having been first horse with the heaviest weight in school, if I can’t carry you?” So he got up and I carried him a long way, and then a cart overtook us, and we got a lift home.  And they knew us quite well, which shows how little use walnut-juice is, and it is disgusting to get off.