Through This
Doorway The Corn Runs Into A Measure, And Is Weighed.
By measures
of forty bushels each, the tale is kept.
There stands the
apparatus, with the figures plainly marked, over against the
porter's eye; and as the sum mounts nearly up to forty bushels he
closes the door till the grains run thinly through, hardly a
handful at a time, so that the balance is exactly struck. Then the
teller standing by marks down his figure, and the record is made.
The exact porter touches the string of another door, and the forty
bushels of corn run out at the bottom of the measure, disappear
down another shoot, slanting also toward the water, and deposit
themselves in the canal boat. The transit of the bushels of corn
from the larger vessel to the smaller will have taken less than a
minute, and the cost of that transit will have been - a farthing.
But I have spoken of the rivers of wheat, and I must explain what
are those rivers. In the working of the elevator, which I have
just attempted to describe, the two vessels were supposed to be
lying at the same wharf on the same side of the building, in the
same water, the smaller vessel inside the larger one. When this is
the case the corn runs direct from the weighing measure into the
shoot that communicates with the canal boat. But there is not room
or time for confining the work to one side of the building.
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