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 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 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