[…]many a time has the little game been tried upon me, and I have found it sometimes necessary to use my shambuck, to bring the imposter to a sense of right.

The fastidious and solitary public-schoolboy [George Orwell] dosses down with tramps and tarts and forces himself to endure bedbugs and chamberpots and lockups. The extraordinary thing about this nostalgie de la boue is that it is undertaken with a humorous self-consciousness and without a tinge of religious abjection or mortification.

He was scared crapless.

After all, there might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born monsters as folklore claimed.