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Daybreak brought quiet to an end. The silence was no longer oppressive. A hundred and twenty stevedores lined up on the wharf for work and breakfast. The dock had tracks, and trucks running to its open warehouses. Boxes, barrels, and bales, pitched out of that ship, thrown onto the trucks and wheeled away, told the story of better days to come.

The tent was speedily lowered. The Fans grasped their spears and lay down behind the circle of boxes and bales, and the six Houssas, the two white men and Ostik, to whom a trade musket had been entrusted, took their places at regular intervals round the circle, which was some eight yards in diameter.

"At least they always appear in plays and pictures seated at the foot of a high, rocky cliff in some lonely spot, with bales and casks and strange looking bundles about. No one would be heartless enough to ask what was inside the bundles, but I have always had a strong suspicion that it was excelsior." "What have you been smuggling, Hippy?" asked Miss Thompson.

He was young and fresh-coloured, and showed fine white teeth when he smiled, which was often. He produced his bales, presents for Halldis and Orme; and presently, while they were all pulling over the things, he held up a jointed girdle of wrought silver with crystals set in every square of it. This he offered to Gudrid. "For you, lady, if you will accept of it," he said.

"I have carried heavier bales, many a time, much longer distances than that though I do not say that the woman was not a tidy weight, for, indeed, she was; but I would have carried down ten of them for the honour I had in being shaken by the hand by Prince Rupert, as gallant a sailor as ever sailed a ship.

For what we now had from the Success, we returned some bales of coarse broad-cloth, as much pitch and tar as he would have, and some pigs of copper: I gave him also a large silver-ladle for a dozen spadoen, or Spanish swords.

Acting on the request of the cotton growing interests, appointed a committee to assist in carrying out their plans. As it result of this cooperation sufficient funds have been pledged to finance the storage and carrying of 4,000,000 bales of cotton. Whether those who own the cotton are willing to put a part of their stock into this plan depends on themselves.

On the other side, of a surety, the shipping lay thick. The merchants walked on the quay, and the sailors sang as they swung out the corded bales. But as for me, I must stay down in the meadow, and imagine it all as best I could. Once I broached the subject to Charlotte, and found, to my surprise, that she had had the same joys and encountered the same disappointments in this delectable country.

In the end I had quite a store of clothing; and I waited while he finished his own work that we might go down together to the launch awaiting us. There we found Black, watching men who were putting large bales of goods into the screw steamer, and everywhere there was sign of the break-up of the settlement.

For in themselves they mean nothing, and the choice of possible symbols is always so great that we should, like the donkey who stood equidistant between two bales of hay, perish from sheer indecision among the symbols that compete for our attention. Here, for example, are the reasons for their vote as stated by certain private citizens to a newspaper just before the election of 1920.