to wrestle with the
problems of the Customs manifest. I myself had handed over trench
stores; this looked a worse job, and there were the familiar dilemmas
of one thing with different names.

The ship was not here, it soon showed, to take her time. Loading began
after dinner. A leather band or rather gutter working on rollers was
lifted out from the wharf over each of several holds, and a spout fixed
at its extremity; the gang in charge spread sacking under the feeding
band and directed the spout as they wished. Then the machinery behind
began to drone, and the grain, like a gliding brook, to travel along
the leather band; whence, at the overturn, it leapt into the spout which
directed its descent into the hold, while a sort of idle snowstorm of
chaff and draff glistened thick in the sunlight. Many heads looked
over the rails to see this process at first, but there was a sameness
about it and the heads quickly found other occupation. Presently I went
to look at the activities behind the scenes, where a gang was taking
bags of grain from a railway truck and emptying them through a grating
into another travelling conduit, which duly under the flooring of the
building bore the wheat to the automatic machines. There, it seemed
to my inept wish to learn, it was amassed until a certain weight was
registered, and that point reached the heap was flung forward into
the feeder which ran up to the spout over our hold. Before the yellow
current arrived there, it had been sampled at intervals by a boy who
squatted beside, dipping a horn-shaped can on the end of a stick into
it, and filling thereby small labelled sacks convenient to him.

The Brazilian steamer ahead of us was receiving the grain in bags, which
looked oddly like pigs asleep as they were hurried along the endless band.
On this steamer, the _Caxambu_, real live pigs and sheep were routing
about over the forecastle. I was told that she was an ex-German. Anyway,
though in deshabille, she was a handsome ship. Her bell was the most
resonant; the _Bonadventure's_ was known still more surely for a thin
tinkler when that gong rang.

For the settlement beyond, it was not conspicuous. The spires of Bahia
Blanca showed up white some few miles inland; the nearer scene was one of
tin roofs, of railway coaches and wagons, small muddy decks and mud
flats. Naturally the steward was fishing. But nothing was biting. He
stood pensively gazing into heaven, even holding the line listless