when just as he put the large door-key into his mother's cottage he grew
aware of peculiar phenomena at the top end of Brougham Street, where it
runs into St Luke's Square. And then in the gas-lit gloom of the warm
summer night he perceived a vast and vague rectangular form in the slow
movement towards the slope of Brougham Street.

It was a pantechnicon van.

But the extraordinary thing was, not that it should be a pantechnicon
van, but that if should be moving of its own accord and power. For there
were no horses in front of it, and Denry saw that the double shafts had
been pushed up perpendicularly, after the manner of carmen when they
outspan. The pantechnicon was running away. It had perceived the wrath
to come and was fleeing. Its guardians had evidently left it imperfectly
scotched or braked, and it had got loose.

It proceeded down the first bit of Brougham Street with a dignity worthy
of its dimensions, and at the same time with apparently a certain sense
of the humour of the situation. Then it seemed to be saying to itself:
"Pantechnicons will be pantechnicons." Then it took on the absurd
gravity of a man who is perfectly sure that he is not drunk.
Nevertheless it kept fairly well to the middle of the road, but as
though the road were a tight-rope.

The rumble of it increased as it approached Denry. He withdrew the key
from his mother's cottage and put it in his pocket. He was always at his
finest in a crisis. And the onrush of the pantechnicon constituted a
clear crisis. Lower down the gradient of Brougham Street was more
dangerous, and it was within the possibilities that people inhabiting
the depths of the street might find themselves pitched out of bed by the