There was a butcher's cart on the right, and Benham, mistrusting the
intelligence of his steed, insisted upon an excessive amplitude of
clearance. He did not reckon with the hand-barrow on his left,
piled up with dirty plates from the lunch of Trinity Hall. It had
been left there; its custodian was away upon some mysterious errand.
Heaven knows why Trinity Hall exhibited the treasures of its
crockery thus stained and deified in the Cambridge streets. But it
did--for Benham's and Prothero's undoing. Prothero saw the great
wheel over which he was poised entangle itself with the little wheel
of the barrow. "God!" he whispered, and craned, fascinated. The
little wheel was manifestly intrigued beyond all self-control by the
great wheel; it clung to it, it went before it, heedless of the
barrow, of which it was an inseparable part. The barrow came about
with an appearance of unwillingness, it locked against the great
wheel; it reared itself towards Prothero and began, smash, smash,
smash, to shed its higher plates. It was clear that Benham was
grappling with a crisis upon a basis of inadequate experience. A
number of people shouted haphazard things. Then, too late, the
barrow had persuaded the little wheel to give up its fancy for the
great wheel, and there was an enormous crash.

"Whoa!" cried Benham. "Whoa!" but also, unfortunately, he sawed
hard at the horse's mouth.

The animal, being in some perplexity, danced a little in the narrow
street, and then it had come about and it was backing, backing, on
the narrow pavement and towards the plate-glass window of a book and
newspaper shop. Benham tugged at its mouth much harder than ever.
Prothero saw the window bending under the pressure of the wheel. A
sense of the profound seriousness of life and of the folly of this