pick and span. Oh! To be sure there were also a couple of
negro policemen in the smaller room behind the thin wooden partition of
our own, but negro policemen scarcely count in Zone Police reckonings.

"By Heck! They must use a lot o' mules t' haul aout all thet dirt,"
observed an Arkansas farmer to his nephew, home from the Zone on
vacation. He would have thought so indeed could he have spent a day at
Corozal and watched the unbroken deafening procession of dirt-trains
scream by on their way to the Pacific,--straining Moguls dragging a
furlong of "Lidgerwood flats," swaying "Oliver dumps" with their side
chains clanking, a succession as incessant of "empties" grinding back
again into the midst of the fray. On the tail of every train lounged an
American conductor, dressed more like a miner, though his "front" and
"hind" negro brakemen were as apt to be in silk ties and
patent-leathers. To say nothing of the train-loads that go Atlanticward
and to jungle "dumps" and to many an unnoticed "fill." Then when he had
thus watched the day through it would have been of interest to go and
chat with some of the "Old Timers" who live here beside the track and
who have seen, or at least heard, this same endless stream of rock and
earth race by six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for six years, as
constant and heavily-laden to-day as in the beginning. He might
discover, as not all his fellow-countrymen have as yet, that the little
surgical operation on Mother Earth we are engaged in is no mule job.

The week-end gave me time to get back in touch with affairs in the
States among the newspaper files at the Y. M. C. A. building. Uncle Sam
surely makes life comfortable for his children wherever he takes hold.
It is not enough that he shall clean up and set in order these tropical
pest-holes; he will have the employee fancy himself completely at home.
Here I sat in one of the dozen big airy recreation halls, well stocked
with man's playthings, which the government has erected on the Zone; I,
who two weeks before had been thankful for lodging on the earth floor
of a Honduranean hut. The Y. M. C. A. is the chief social center on the
Isthmus, the rendezvous and leisure-hour headquarters of the thousands
that inhabit bachelor quarters--except the few of the purely barroom
type. "Everybody's Association" it might perhaps more properly be
called, for ladies find welcome and the laughter of children over the
parlor games is rarely lacking. I