The decks are black with waiting men as the collier comes alongside, and the instant the mooring-lines are made fast several hundred of them--each with a broad short-handled scoop--clamber over her rail and leap down into the open holds. Others toss down bundles of the sacks in which the coal is hoisted aboard. These sacks are a highly important and distinctive factor in British naval coaling, the ingenious way in which they are used being largely responsible for the remarkable speed-records which have been put up. They are made of extremely heavy jute, bound with light manilla rope, and of a size sufficient to hold two hundredweight of coal. At the mouth are two beckets or iron rings, through which the strop is rove. Each sack weighs in the neighbourhood of 16 lb., even when new; water-soaked and smeared with a paste of coal-dust, its weight may be increased by from 20 to 50 per cent. Before the war, the cost of a sack was about 11_s._ 6_d._, but the rise in jute must have made it much greater at the present time. The sacks are filled by scoop in the holds of the collier, and dragged together in bunches of about a dozen each. The wire cable from the hoisting-boom is run through the rings at the mouth of each sack and made fast. As the winch winds in, it tightens and takes up the slack, thus drawing the mouths of the sacks together and preventing the spilling of coal in hoisting. The instant the sacks are hoisted to the deck of the warship a man casts loose one end of the wire cable, and on the swinging back of the whip it is pulled out of the rings, and the coal left ready for the barrowmen. The barrow employed appears to differ in no essential detail from the truck used by railway porters in handling trunks. It is perhaps a little smaller than the average of the latter, and somewhat more "squattily" built. After the "technique" of picking up and dumping one's sack is mastered, it is by no means difficult to handle, the main point being to trundle it as nearly as possible on the "balance," so that a minimum of strength is wasted in keeping the barrow from "sitting up" and "sitting down." Once these details are understood, any fairly strong man or boy should be equal to the physical exertion of coaling for two or three hours at a stretch without rest. A short, sturdily built man is at something of an advantage over a tall one, as the latter has to stoop considerably to bring his "centre of effort" behind his load. The wheeling of the sacks, from the point where they are left in a tottering pile on the deck to the opening of the chutes down which their contents are dumped to the bunkers, is the most important stage of the operation, for the way it is carried out makes all the difference between a fast and a slow coaling. Obviously, then, it is to the organisation of this "traffic" that the greatest attention is given.