“A half million bananas!” cried Willie. “How many bananas does one ship carry, anyway?” “I can’t tell you exactly, but it runs in my head that a ship carries somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 bunches.” “How many bananas are there in a bunch?” “I can’t tell you that exactly, either. But if you will recall how a bunch of bananas looks, you will remember that the bananas come in little clusters, like hands. I often buy one of those clusters, and I know they have a dozen or more good bananas to the hand. A good bunch of bananas will probably have twelve to eighteen or twenty of these hands. So I would say that a small bunch contains 150 bananas and a big bunch 300. If we split the difference, and say 200 bananas to a bunch and multiply that by 5,000, we’ll be within gunshot of the number of bananas in a boat load. That makes 1,000,000 bananas.” “Whew!” whistled Willie. “Think of that. A million bananas in one boat load. But tell me. How can they get baked?” “Did you ever sit on a tin roof in the middle of a hot July day?” demanded the purser. Willie chuckled. “I have sat down on one,” he said, “but I didn’t stay long.” His companions laughed, and Mr. Robbins continued, “A steel steamer in the tropics heats up just about the way a tin roof does in July. Of course an effort is made to ventilate the fruit, but if the ship does not get out of that intense tropic heat in pretty quick time, you can imagine what happens to the bananas inside. Perhaps they do not literally bake, but they are so affected by the heat that they are unfit to eat.” “That must have been a sight—to watch them throw half a million bananas overboard,” said Willie. “How do they handle bananas, anyway? They can’t handle them as they do bales and boxes.” “Would you like to see them unloading a banana boat?” asked the purser. “I sure would.” “Well, there’s evidently a boat unloading now, or these wagon loads of fresh fruit would not be passing. The fruit pier is near at hand and we’ll drop in and watch them unload, while we are waiting to get our dinner.” “Thank you,” said Willie. “That will be bully!” Presently they came to a banana pier. Empty wagons were streaming into it and trucks laden with green bananas were issuing from it. The visitors entered the pier and walked along it until they came to where the unloading was in progress. Then, standing to one side, out of the way, they watched the process.