oints of the shafts digging and prodding into the surface of the
road gave the pantechnicon something to think about for a few seconds.
But unfortunately the precipitousness of the street encouraged its
head-strong caprices, and a few seconds later all four shafts were
broken, and the pantechnicon seemed to scent the open prairie. (What it
really did scent was the canal.) Then Denry discovered the brake, and
furiously struggled with the iron handle. He turned it and turned it,
some forty revolutions. It seemed to have no effect. The miracle was
that the pantechnicon maintained its course in the middle of the street.
Presently Denry could vaguely distinguish the wall and double wooden
gates of the canal wharf. He could not jump off; the pantechnicon was
now an express, and I doubt whether he would have jumped off, even if
jumping off had not been madness. His was the kind of perseverance that,
for the fun of it, will perish in an attempt. The final fifty or sixty
yards of Brougham Street were level, and the pantechnicon slightly
abated its haste. Denry could now plainly see, in the radiance of a
gas-lamp, the gates of the wharf, and on them the painted letters:--

SHROPSHIRE UNION CANAL COY., LTD..

GENERAL CARRIERS.

_No Admittance except on Business_

He was heading straight for those gates, and the pantechnicon evidently
had business within. It jolted over the iron guard of the
weighing-machine, and this jolt deflected it, so that instead of aiming
at the gates it aimed for part of a gate and part of a brick pillar.
Denry ground his teeth together and clung to his seat. The gate might
have been paper, and the brick pillar a cardboard pillar. The
pantechnicon went through them as a sword will go through a ghost, and
Denry was still alive. The remainder of the journey was brief and
violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement, and partly to the
propinquity of the canal basin. The pantechnicon jumped into the canal
like a mastodon, and drank.

Denry, clinging to the woodwork, was submerged for a moment, but, by
standing on the narrow platform from which sprouted the splintered ends
of the shafts, he could get his waist clear of the water. He was not a
swimmer.

All was still and dark, save for the faint stream of starlight on the
broad bosom of the canal basin. The pantechnicon had encountered nobody
whatever _en route_. Of its strange escapade Denry had been the
sole witness.

"Well, I'm dashed!" h