took the best workmen, had at its command the finest horses, possessed model buildings and a highly perfected equipment. Their trucks, harness, cart tilts, lines, hampers, pulleys and scales were unequalled among the rival corporations. From Hoboken to Austruweel and Merxem one met only their busy gangs of workmen. Their weighers and gaugers were transhipping grain imported in lighters of an invariable burden; their porters were shouldering sacks and bales and lining them up on the quays, or hoisting them into drays, their dockers were piling planks, beams and raw wood upon the shore in assembling the products of the same species.
Too long accustomed to working with their two hands to peg away with pen and pencil, it was to Laurent that, on the recommendation of their colleague Vingerhout, the syndic of the directors or baes, they entrusted the office work and the task of checking up, at the entrance or exit of the docks, the accounts turned in by the weighers and gaugers of other corporations.
If a coffee merchant, a customer of the America, bought up a part of a colleague's commodity, Laurent had to receive the stock from the rival Nation with which the seller had dealt. A day's weighing in the midst of a tumult, under the broiling heat of the sun, or in rain or snow, was frequently his lot. But he was absorbed in his work. Hundreds of bales, stamped and numbered from the first to the last, marched past him. He added up columns of figures as he kept a sharp watch upon the records of the scales. For beware of mistakes! If the buyer did not find what he had paid for he would hold the America responsible for the mistake, unless Laurent could prove that the loss emanated from the seller and his workmen.
