The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody’s else’s pork pie! Stop him!”
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 3. Pip’s conscience weighs heavy on him as he travels through the marsh mist to rendezvous with criminal Magwitch with stolen pork pie. With superb use of personification by Dickens, the boy imagines the dykes and banks are witnesses to what his childish mind believes to be a terrible crime.