f peculiar
pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score of
such coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, being
acquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? The
foreigners had cried, "Take this money and go buy a farm somewhere
else," and you looked around you and saw all the world you had ever
really known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. Where
would you go, think you, to buy that new farm? Even if you fled and
found another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do,
having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces of
metal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stood
behind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born and
dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To say the least you would be
some peeved.

It was midafternoon when the white bulk of Gatun locks rose on the
horizon. Then the lake opened out, the great dam, that is rather a
connecting link between two ranges of hills, spread across all the
landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy steps behind the station to
a telephone. Five minutes later I was hurrying away across locks and
dam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to inquire who, and wherefore,
had attempted to burn up the I. C. C. launch attached to dredge No.
----.

My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a close. I could have
remained longer without regret, but the world is wide and life is
short. Soon came the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back across
the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of my existence as a "Zoner."
Chiefly for old times' sake I dropped off at Empire. But it was not the
same Empire of the census. Almost all the old crowd was gone; one by
one they had "kissed the Zone good-by." "The boss" of those days had
never returned, "smiling Johnny" had been transferred, even Ben had
"done quit an' gone back to Bahbaydos." The Zone is like a small
section of life; as in other places where generations are short one
catches there a hint of what old age will be. It was like wandering
over the old campus when those who were freshmen in our day had hawked
their gowns and mortarboards and gone their way; I felt like a man in
his dotage with only the new, unknown, and indifferent generation about
him.

I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far down below was the same
struggling energy, the same gangs of upright human ants, the "cut" with
its jangle