way up again to stalk through long
lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. I
rolled down in the sand and rubble of what threatened to develop into
"slides." I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted
negroes--negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color--while
dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie"
blasts and rocks of the size of drummers' trunks that spilled from it
as it swung. I climbed up into the quivering monster itself to
interrupt the engineer at his levers, to shout at the craneman on his
beam. I sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed,
walking along the running-board into the cab; if not to "get" the
engineer at least to gain new life from his private ice-water tank. I
scrambled over tenders and quarter-miles of "Lidgerwood flats" piled
high with broken rock and earth, to scream at the American conductor
and his black brakemen, often to find myself, by the time I had set
down one of them, carried entirely out of my district, to Pedro Miguel
or beyond the Chagres, and have to "hit the grit" in "hobo" fashion and
catch something back to the spot where I left off. In short I poked
into every corner of the "cut" known to man, bawling in the
November-first voice of a presidential candidate to everything in
trousers:

"Eh! 'Ad yer census taken yet?"

And what was my reward? From the northern edge of Empire to where the
"cut" sinks away into the Chagres and the low, flat country beyond, I
enrolled--just thirteen persons. It was then and there, though it still
lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a census enumerator. With
slow and deliberate step I climbed out of the canal and across a pathed
field to Bas Obispo and, sitting down in the shade of her station,
patiently awaited the train that would carry me back to Empire.

Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I
enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented. Martinique
negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some eighty per cent
illiterate; of some three hundred of the first only a half dozen even
claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock was virtually universal
among them.

Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states and
dependencies represented on the Isthmus. My own cards showed a few
less. Most conspicuous absences, besides Ame