2504 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
deferred delight. To be sure, the milk used was condensed milk, 
but that proved a very fair substitute. Moreover it was gratify- 
ing to our patriotism to find that whether the constitution fol- 
lowed the flag or not, the soda-water fountain did. 
There were a number of really first-class stores stocked 
largely with goods from the United States, where some of our 
ladies shopped in quite a satisfactory way in spite of linguistic 
obstacles. The latest New York paper that we secured here 
was the ‘‘Times,’’ dated July 10th and therefore just two weeks 
old. There were several showers during the day and after a 
few hours of sightseeing most of us returned to the ship, where 
we were under shelter, at least; although the racket of the hoist- 
ing engines used in loading the countless sacks of sugar was 
anything but soothing. We also coaled here, but the method 
was entirely different from that in such a port as Santa Lucia, 
for instance, where the vessels were coaled by women earrying 
baskets of coal on their heads in endless procession, each dump- 
ing her load as she passes the chute, thereby raising a cloud of 
dust. At San Juan the collier came alongside and an endless 
chain of buckets issued from her hold and were automatically 
emptied into an iron tube resembling a smoke-stack, the force 
of gravity conveying the fuel to the hold, which was so well 
covered that little coal dust escaped. 
We went to a movie in the evening and saw a good patriotic 
picture with excellent presentations of battle scenes in France. 
All of the legends were in Spanish of course, and the writer was 
expected to interpret, there being a tradition in the party that 
he knew that language. He probably hit it right part of the 
time. The Star Spangled Banner was played at the end of the 
performance, but it is not certain that the audience would have 
stood up had it not been for our prompt example, although it 
would be but fair to give it the benefit of the doubt. On mention- 
ing our surprise that the English language seems to have made 
go little progress here I was informed by one man that although 
he had learned English in school, he found it so little used in 
business and social life in Porto Rico that he had almost no use 
for it in a practical way and therefore had forgotten most of it 
We tried to learn something of the attitude of the people to- 
ward the United States and America and our impression was 
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