bays. There will be 1,056 bays in the proposed Clearing House.

Each bay is a section of the floor space 146 feet long and 25 feet wide, or less, and, this being the London Clearing House, each bay represents a district of London and another town; for instance, a bay might represent Peckham and Birmingham, or Clapham and Tunbridge Wells. In the case of small towns and villages, a bay might represent a district of London and a group of such small towns or villages.

As each parcel is removed from the container, the porter who removes it calls out sufficient to identify it, and the checker marks up the entry as being received in the Clearing House. The porter puts each parcel so removed on to a steel tray, of which a regular stream is slowly passing at his feet.

If the reader should be bored with mechanical details it will be open to him to skip the following description of the machinery, rough as the outline necessarily is, and take up the story again on page 110.

If he does this, however, it will be necessary to fix the situation at which we have arrived clearly in his mind.

The situation is this-that the man who takes the parcel from the container shall be able to send that parcel to that bay in the Clearing House for which it is intended, and where all those goods for any particular town are collected together for despatch. It is obvious that this transference must be done swiftly and without confusion of any kind, and further that thousands of these transferences between the 1,056 bays of the Clearing House must be made at the same time. This can be done.

The reader will remember the story of the wonderful carpet in the " Arabian Nights." It will be remembered that the fortunate possessors of this carpet, by seating themselves upon it and by rubbing a magic ring, were at once transported to a desired spot.

If the reader will substitute the steel tray, just mentioned, for the magic carpet, and an electric button for the magic ring, the apparatus for doing the same thing in the Clearing House is complete, as far as the man who directs the operation is concerned. No human hand touches the parcels as they travel from bay to bay. Machinery which gives and takes instructions performs all the intervening work.

It will, therefore, be understood that parcels can be conveyed from any one point of the Clearing House to any other point in the Clearing House without handling.

The hand-truck has disappeared. The factor of distance the vice of goods stations-is eliminated. Distance is time, therefore time has been conquered, and high speed, the essential, has been attained. The great economic battle is therefore won.

The armies of men with hand-trucks doing the work of helots, struggling in a tangled mass, sweating and swearing, and as a result often drinking more than is good for them, quarrelling and inevitably obstructing each other, have all disappeared. Every man stands at his post with a clean-cut job, alert and ready. He is no longer the overworked, underfed, unkempt beast of burden, but a cleanly, dignified man, earning a decent wage, and working reasonable hours.

To continue on the lines of a more detailed explanation, let the reader return to the point at which the packages have been placed on the steel trays, a stream of which is always passing at the porter's feet, and the movement of which is under his control. In the diagram this stream of trays is marked as an alley. On the arrival of a tray at the mouth of an alley, a lad stationed at a desk reads the address on the parcel or parcels, and presses certain electric buttons on a small table in front of him. The first disengaged car, or "trucker," of a continuous and constantly moving belt, or train of truckers passing this point, magnetically

seizes the tray with its load of goods from the despatching platform.

This is a result of the pressing of the electric buttons by the lad at the desk. There are 25,000 trays in the Clearing House. This stream of trays, which is one of 596 such streams, moves very slowly down the alley, and the operator is able to stop and start it at will, and to draw any one of the trays out on to the floor of the bay, without interfering with the others.

On the bales-floor these trays measure five feet by four feet, and on the parcels-floor they measure three feet by two feet.

The function of the tray is to carry goods from one part of the Clearing House to another, and the function of the trucker is to carry the tray.

The tray is always carried on a trucker, except when it is in the alley, when it is moved by a sprocket chain. The trays are constantly circulating all over the floors of the Clearing House, and are under automatic control. They are carried upon truckers, which are linked together in the form of a belt.

A belt is made up of a train of these truckers, which are steel cars. On the inner belts of the bales-floor the deck of these truckers would each be ten feet by four feet. One hundred of these truckers would form a complete inner belt. The truckers each possess a mechanism and a controlling device, which enables a trucker to collect a tray from a despatching point, to transfer it automatically during its journey to another trucker, which will again transfer it to a trucker which will deliver the tray automatically at a point predetermined by the operator. In fact, these machines talk to each other, and take each other's instructions, and, what is more, they do not forget them, but invariably obey them.

The sorting scheme is as follows:

There are the inner belts which serve the bays. There are the outer belts which run round the whole