I came upon the wrecked handling-machine halfway to St. John's Wood
station.  At first I thought a house had fallen across the road.  It
was only as I clambered among the ruins that I saw, with a start, this
mechanical Samson lying, with its tentacles bent and smashed and
twisted, among the ruins it had made.  The forepart was shattered.  It
seemed as if it had driven blindly straight at the house, and had been
overwhelmed in its overthrow.  It seemed to me then that this might
have happened by a handling-machine escaping from the guidance of its
Martian.  I could not clamber among the ruins to see it, and the
twilight was now so far advanced that the blood with which its seat
was smeared, and the gnawed gristle of the Martian that the dogs had
left, were invisible to me.