set that made glorious his petty prides. A vast
plane of unrippling plum-colored sea was set with mirror-like pools
where floated tree-branches so suffused with light that the glad heart
blessed them. His first flying-fish leaped silvery from silver sea,
and Carl cried, almost aloud, "This is what I've been wanting all my
life!"

Aloud, to Harry: "Say, what's it like in Kansas? I'm going down
through there some day." He spoke harshly. But the real Carl was
robed in light and the murmurous wake of evening, with the tropics
down the sky-line.

* * * * *

Lying in his hot steerage bunk, stripped to his under-shirt, Carl
peered through the "state-room" window to the swishing night sea,
conscious of the rolling of the boat, of the engines shaking her, of
bolts studding the white iron wall, of life-preservers over his head,
of stokers singing in the gangway as they dumped the clinkers
overboard. The _Panama_ was pounding on, on, on, and he rejoiced,
"This is just what I've wanted, always."

* * * * *

They are creeping in toward the wharf at Colon. He is seeing Panama!
First a point of palms, then the hospital, the red roofs of the I. C.
C. quarters at Cristobal, and negroes on the sun-blistered wharf.

At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland--a medley of Colon and
Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like
monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen
in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads
and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in
lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of
their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with
silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched
pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island
pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French
peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German
concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish
signs and Spiggoty money and hotels with American cuspidors and
job-hunters; tin roofs and arcades; shops open to the street in front,
but mysterious within, giving glimpses of the canny Chinese
proprietors smoking tiny pipes. Trains from towns along the Canal, and
sometimes the black funeral-car, bound for Monkey Hill Cemetery.
Gambling-houses where it is considere