nging
shelves when not in use. Mere noise did not even disturb their dreams.
We roused them by pencil-jabs in the ribs, and they started up with
savage, animal-like grunts and murderous glares which instantly
subsided to sheepish grins and voiceless astonishment at sight of a
white face bending over them. Now and again open-mouthed guffaws of
laughter greeted the mumbled admission of some powerful buck that he
could not read, or did not know his age. But there was nothing even
faintly resembling insolence, for these were all British West Indians
without a corrupting "States nigger" among them. A half-hour after our
arrival we had tagged the barracks and dived into the next camp,
blacker and sleepier and more populous than the first. It was February
morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and stepped under the
shower-bath that is always preliminary, on the Zone, to a night's
repose.

A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general destruction developed
gradually into full consciousness at four-thirty. House 47 was in
riotous uproar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign invasion was
pending; it was merely the houseful of engineers in their customary
daily struggle to catch the labor-train and be away to work by
daylight. When the hour's rampage had subsided I rose to switch off the
light and turned in again.

The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them when I
passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and machinery,
reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green jungle strands and
tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed labor-camps were silent and
empty, but for a lonely janitor languidly mopping a floor. Before the
buildings a black gang was dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by
one into a great kettle of scalding water. But there are also "married
quarters" at Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge,
with six families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination to
an ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in a
family. I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I was
not well started on the second house, yet carried away more than sixty
filled-out cards.

More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by nights
spent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra way. Then
one morning I tramped far out the highway to the old Scotchman's
farm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began the