somehow they have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal the
best-intentioned factory town. There are hints that the builders have
heard somewhere of the science of landscape gardening. At times these
same houses are deceiving, for all I. C. C. buildings bear a strong
family resemblance, and it is only at the door that you know whether it
is bachelors' quarters, a family residence, or the supreme court.

From the outside world "P'reeso" scarcely draws a glance of attention;
but once in it you find a whole Zone town with all the accustomed
paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary, hospital and police
station, all ruled over and held in check by the famous "Colonel" in
command of the latter. Moreover Paraiso will some day come again into
her own, when the "relocation" opens and brings her back on the main
line, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a railless
shore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broad
macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle.

Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negro
cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of hills, for
Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now and was not
exactly in a condition to interview American housewives. My own task
began down at the row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacks
and tenements with many Spanish laborers' wives. Then toward noon the
labor-train screamed in, with two "gold" coaches and many open
cattle-cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six
hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood
through a suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and
shrieked away again.

Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds of
sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell
around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble
food--yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when
each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to
cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed,
with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and
in the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confused
chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot
dictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I
like to speak Spanish, I can endure