about getting a crew in place of our precious
mutineers?" I asked.

"He's picked up several fellows already. A Yankee named Stubbs is chief
engineer. Sam is shipping Jamaica niggers for firemen."

No schoolboy out for a holiday could have been half so keen to be free
as I was. At the wharf I picked up a _coche_ and was driven to the
Tivoli, the hotel in the American quarter where our party was staying.

The mud and the mosquitoes of former years were gone, though the natives
were as indolent as ever. It is a town of color, due largely to the
assorted population. I was told by a young engineer from Gatun that
forty languages are spoken on the Isthmus at present, a condition due to
the number of Caribbean islanders employed by our government.

I found that the program for the day included a trip to Colon on the
Isthmus railroad. Miss Berry preferred to rest quietly at the hotel, so
her niece, Sam, and I set out to see the great canal.

As I look back on it now Panama means to me a series of panoramic
pictures. To give more than a cursory description of our impressions is
impossible. The fact is that one obliterated another so swiftly as to
leave a sense only of confusion.

Take Culebra Cut, for instance, where the monsters of man's invention
are biting into the mountain sides, ripping down with giant jaws loose
dirt, and hauling it away on a maze of tracks.

Great hoses, under tremendous pressure, are tearing at hills and
washing them down. All the time there is a deafening noise, the crash of
the continent's spine being rent by dynamite, the roar of trains, the
shrieks of dirt shovels blowing off steam, the stab and hammer of
drills.

Man is making war on nature with amazing energy on a titanic scale. The
disorder seemed hopeless, but one realized that these little figures
moving about it in the man-made canon were achieving the seemingly
impossible none the less.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Evelyn asked for the tenth time, as we looked down
on a machine which had just seized a section of track and hoisted it up,
rails and ties complete, to swing it over to another place.

I quoted to her Damon Runyon's verses:

We are ants upon a mountain, but we're leavin' of our dent,
An' our teeth-marks bitin' scenery they will show the way we went;
We're a liftin' half-creation, and we're changin' it around,
Just to suit our playful purpose when we're diggin' in the ground.

"You Americans take the cake," B