A Favorite Paragraph

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's friend Dill (based on Nelle Harper Lee's real childhood, friend Truman Capote) is a real storyteller. He runs away from his home in Meridian, Alabama to his aunt's in Maycomb to be with Jem and Scout again. When asked by Scout how he'd managed it, he tells this story:

Having been bound in chains and left to die in the basement by his new father, who disliked him, and secretly kept alive on raw field peas by a passing farmer who heard his cries for help (the good man poked a bushel pod by pod through the ventilator), Dill worked himself free by pulling the chains from the wall. Still in wrist mancles, he wandered two miles out of Meridian where he discovered a small animal show and was immediately engaged to wash the camel. He traveled with the show all over Mississippi until his infallible sense of direction told him he was in Abbot County, Alabama, just across the river from Maycomb. He walked the rest of the way.