As the Cleveland man continues to din these statistics into your ear, you let your gaze wander. Over across a narrow slip a gaunt steel framework rises. It holds a cradle, large enough and strong enough to accommodate a single steel railroad "gondola," which in turn carries fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are clamped over the sides of one of these "gondola" cars, which a seemingly tireless switch-engine has just shunted into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to the top of the framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge, three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of the car in an uprising cloud of black dust and drops through a funnel into the expansive hold of the vessel that is moored at the dock. The car is righted; some remaining coal rattles to its bottom. Once again it is overturned and the remaining coal goes through the funnel. When it is righted the second time it is entirely empty. The cradle returns to its low level, the car is unfastened and given a push. It makes a gravity movement and returns to a string of its fellows that have been through a similar process. You take out your watch. The process consumes just two minutes for each car. That means thirty cars an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of coal, the capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been placed in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are familiar, perhaps, with the craft that tie up at the wharves of seaboard towns, and you roughly estimate the capacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great hold, and you find yourself astonished at the result of such computations. You confide that astonishment to your Cleveland man. He smiles at you, benignly. "That is really not very rapid work," he says, "they put eleven thousand tons of ore into the _Corey_ in thirty-nine minutes up at Superior last year." And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the world. When the British ship-owners heard of that feat at a port two thousand miles inland, they ceased to deride American docking facilities.