ing" from the example of lazy negroes who, where
laborers must be had, are a bit better than no labor--though not much.

The third day came, and high above me towered the rock cliffs of
Culebra's palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit in
echelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock "slide" dribbling
warningly down. He who still fancies the digging of the canal an
ordinary task should have tramped with us through just our section,
halting to speak to every man in it, climbing out of this man-made
canon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its ends, while at
Culebra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain walls on either
side.

From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are making
light of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up their great
disasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere absurdity.
As to catastrophies, a great "slide" or a premature dynamite explosion
are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to
Europeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down before
the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his
hands, and pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't
belittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got
to be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the
Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-biting of
Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man on
the job,--"the Colonel," the average American, the "rough-neck"--goes
right on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumor
of all this outside noise.

Mighty is the job from one point of view; yet tiny from another. With
all his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity, and his feverish
activity all little man has succeeded in doing is to scratch a little
surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a few superficial veins, of
water, that trickle down the rocky face of the "cut."

By March twelfth we had carried our task past and under Empire
suspension bridge, and the end of the "cut" was almost in sight. That
day I clawed and scrambled a score of times up the face of rock walls.
I zigzagged through long rows of negroes pounding holes in rock ledges.
I stumbled and splashed my way through gangs of Martinique "muckers." I
slid down the face of government-made cliffs on the seat of my
commissary breeches. I fought my