sharp corner of a pantechnicon that was determined to be a pantechnicon.
A pantechnicon whose ardour is fairly aroused may be capable of
surpassing deeds. Whole thoroughfares might crumble before it.

As the pantechnicon passed Denry, at the rate of about three and a half
miles an hour, he leaped, or rather he scrambled, on to it, losing
nothing in the process except his straw hat, which remained a witness at
his mother's door that her boy had been that way and departed under
unusual circumstances. Denry had the bright idea of dropping the shafts
down to act as a brake. But, unaccustomed to the manipulation of shafts,
he was rather slow in accomplishing the deed, and ere the first pair of
shafts had fallen the pantechnicon was doing quite eight miles an hour
and the steepest declivity was yet to come. Further, the dropping of the
left-hand shafts jerked the van to the left, and Denry dropped the other
pair only just in time to avoid the sudden uprooting of a lamp-post. The
four points 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