eans was to tickle the slumberer gently on
the soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such as
my tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron. Frequently I
came upon young negro men of the age and type that in white skins would
have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading to themselves in loud
and solemn voices from the Bible, with a far-away look in their eyes;
always I was surrounded by a never-broken babble of voices, for the
West Indian negro can let his face run unceasingly all the day through,
and the night, though he have never a word to say.

Thus my "enumerated" tags spread further and wider over the city of
Empire. I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores of
Railroad Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there appeared
such names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses living in darksome
back cupboards must be unearthed, negro shoemakers were caught at their
stands on the sidewalks, shiny-haired bartenders gave up their
biographies in nasal monosyllables amid the slop of "suds" and the
scrape of celluloid froth-eradicators. Rare was the land that had not
sent representatives to this great dirt-shoveling congress. A Syrian
merchant gasped for breath and fell over his counter in delight to find
that I, too, had been in his native Zakleh, five Punjabis all but died
of pleasure when I mispronounced three words of their tongue.
Occasionally there came startling contrast as I burst unexpectedly into
the ancestral home of some educated native family that had withstood
all the tides of time and change and still lived in the beloved
"Emperador" of their forefathers. Anger was usually near the surface at
my intrusion, but they quickly changed to their ingrown politeness and
chatty sociability when addressed in their own tongue and treated in
their own extravagant gestures. It was almost sure to return again,
however, at the question whether they were Panamanians. Distinctly not!
They were Colombians! There is no such country as Panama.

Thus the enrolling of the faithful continued. Chinese laundrymen
divulged the secrets of their mysterious past between spurts of water
at steaming shirt-bosoms; Chinese merchants, of whom there are hordes
on the Zone, cueless, dressed and betailored till you must look at them
twice to tell them from "gold" employees, the flag of the new republic
flapping above their doors, the new president in their lapels, left off
selling cruc