At the end of an hour every merchant on the ground will have tested and tasted every pile of cheeses--in itself no small saporific achievement. Not only will he have used the taste test on the different piles, but he will have called upon his other four senses to confirm or countervail its decision. He will have examined cheeses by sight; he will have held them to his ear and shaken them, as we might an egg; he will have felt of the weight and solidity of them; and he will have taken long, knowing whiffs of their fragrance. At the end of an hour, then, he is qualified to approach this or that particular dealer and offer him so much per hundred kilos for his cheeses. Then it is that Greek meets Greek. In a moment’s time the dull-looking, uncommunicative, apparently unconcerned provincial maker of cheese seems to be transformed into a cunning, canny, clear-headed man of business. The two of them, merchant and maker, stand for a full minute with their right hands outstretched, like a picture of Captain John Smith sealing a treaty with the Indians. Suppose the maker finally agrees to the price offered: without uttering a syllable he grips the hand of the merchant, and the bargain is closed. If he does not agree, he slaps the merchant’s hand a whack that resounds across the square. By eleven-fifteen the walls of the surrounding houses reverberate with what a stranger around the corner might easily suppose to be the premature explosion of a number of toy balloons--for cheese makers are but human and would rather wait in the hope of being offered more for their stock. Competition is the essence of trade, even in Holland. When a bargain is negotiated, they call a pair of weighmen who load the cheeses upon a barrow--a queer kind of barrow that resembles more a stretcher on sled runners--and carry them to the scales to be weighed. After being weighed and their sale recorded upon the books of the superintendent, the cheeses are loaded back into the wagons and boats to be transferred to the warehouse for shipment. The cheese goes through no further preliminaries if intended for native consumption. If destined for export, however, it must needs undergo a peculiar, yet withal a simple process: it must be well scraped and painted over with a thin aniline dye which rapidly turns as it dries to a glorious vermilion. The scraping is done by machinery, but the dyeing is done by hand and with almost incredible swiftness by the men employed in some of the establishments in Alkmaar.