The wheat comes to the elevator in cars, each of which holds a thousand or fifteen hundred bushels. By a car-dumping machine the grain is unloaded into the basement of the huge buildings at the sides of the tanks. From there it is raised to the top of the elevator in bushel buckets on endless chains at the rate of six hundred and fifty bushels a minute, or more than ten every second. It is next weighed, and then carried on wide belt conveyors into the storage towers. The machinery is so arranged that by pressing a button or moving a lever a stream of wheat will flow to any part of the great granary. The grain runs just like water, save that the belts conduct it uphill or down. When ready to be transferred to a steamer, the wheat is drawn from the bottom of a bin, again elevated to the top of the building, weighed, and then poured into the vessel through spouts. It is not touched by hand from the time it leaves the car until it is taken from the hold of the ship, and the work is done so cheaply that it costs only a fraction of a cent to transfer a bushel of wheat from the car to the boats. For ten or eleven cents a bushel it can be carried a thousand miles or more down the lakes and put into the hold of an ocean steamer that takes it to Europe. In one of the elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Fort William a train of wheat is handled every twenty minutes during the season. I timed the workers as they unloaded one car. It contained sixteen hundred bushels of wheat, or enough, at twenty-five bushels an acre, to equal the crop of a sixty-four acre farm. Nevertheless, it was elevated, weighed, and put in the tanks within less than eight minutes. The open navigation season on the Great Lakes lasts from May to December, and during this time as much as five million bushels of wheat a day have been put on freight boats at Fort William or Port Arthur for trans-shipment to the East. Some of the freighters unload their cargoes at Georgian Bay ports, on the east side of Lake Huron, from where the wheat goes by rail to Montreal. Other ships discharge at Port Colborne, Ontario, from where the grain is carried on barges through the Welland Canal and thence down the St. Lawrence and its canals to Montreal. Still other shipments go through United States ports. A few small steamers take their cargoes all the way by water from the head of the Lakes to Montreal; the grain carried in this way is only between two and three per cent. of the total.