ne line. Here's a sample
card and list of instructions."

In other words kind Uncle Sam was about to give me authority to enter
every dwelling in the most cosmopolitan and thickly populated district
of his Canal Zone, and to put questions to every dweller therein,
note-book and pencil in hand; authority to ramble around a month or
more in sunshine and jungle--and pay me for the privilege. There are
really two methods of seeing the Canal Zone; as an employee or as a
guest at the Tivoli, both of them at about five dollars a day--but at
opposite ends of the thermometer.

There remained a week-end between that Friday morning and the last day
of January, set for the beginning of the census. Certainly I should not
regret the arrival of the day when I should become an employee, with
all the privileges and coupon-books thereunto appertained. For the Zone
is no easy dwelling-place for the non-employee. Our worthy Uncle of the
chin whiskers makes it quite plain that, while he may tolerate the mere
visitor, he does not care to have him hanging around; makes it so
plain, in fact, that a few weeks purely of sight-seeing on the Zone
implies an adamantine financial backing. In his screened and
full-provided towns, where the employee lives in such well-furnished
comfort, the tourist might beat his knuckles bare and shake yellow gold
in the other hand, and be coldly refused even a lodging for the night;
and while he may eat a meal in the employees' hotels--at near twice the
employee's price--the very attitude in which he is received says openly
that he is admitted only on suffrance--permitted to eat only because if
he starved to death our Uncle would have the bother of burying him and
his Zone Police the arduous toil of making out an accident report.

Meanwhile I must change my dwelling-place. For the quartermaster of
Corozal had need of all the rooms within his domain, need so imperative
that seventeen bona fide and wrathy employees were even then bunking in
the pool-room of Corozal hotel. Work on the Zone was moving steadily
Pacificward and the accommodations refused to come with it--at least at
the same degree of speed.

Nor was I especially averse to the transfer. The room-mate with whom
fate had cast me in House 81 was a pleasant enough fellow, a youth of
unobjectionable personal manners even though his "eight-hour graft" was
in the sooty seat of a steam-crane high above Miraflores locks. But he
had one slight idiosyncrasy that