tled by a hearty hail from among the trees
and I looked up to see Y----, of the Smithsonian, fully dressed,
standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of the forest, waving an
insect trap in one hand.

"What the devil are you doing there?" I gasped.

"Doing? I'm taking a walk along the old Gatun-Chorrera trail, and I
fancy I 'll be about the last man to travel it. Come on up to camp."

On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun that will also soon be
lake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the headquarters
of a scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier lunch which
called for none of the excuses made for it by Y---- when he appeared in
his dripping full-dress and joined us without even bothering to change
his water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he had carefully stuck away side
by side an untold number of members of the mosquito family. Queer
vocation; but then, any vocation is good that gives an excuse to live
out in this wild tropical world.

By one we had Dr. O---- aboard and were waving farewell to the camp.
The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward trip; even
nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing. But two raging showers gave
us views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between them
we awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by
shooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would have
killed an elephant.

It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the
American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of
unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the
world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside world
wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere you
never heard of, to somewhere you did not know. Suppose a representative
of that unsympathetic government came snorting down upon you one day in
a wild fearful invention they called a motor-boat, as you were lolling
under the thatch roof your grandfather built, and cried:

"Come on! Get out of here! We're going to burn your house and turn this
country into a lake."

Flood the land which was your great-grand-father's, the spot where you
used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane where
your mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under which
she was wedded--if matters were ever carried to that ceremonious
length. What though this foreign nation gave you a bag o