ifixes and breastpin medallions of Christ to negro women,
to answer my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest of eleven
Bengali peddlers with the bare floor of their single room as bed,
table, and chairs; in one corner, surmounted by their little
embroidered skull-caps, were stacked the bundles with which they pester
Zone housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a dirty rag
against profaning eyes.

Many days had passed before I landed the first Zone resident I could
not enroll unassisted. He was a heathen Chinee newly arrived, who spoke
neither Spanish nor English. It was "Chinese Charlie" who helped me
out. "Chinese Charlie" was a resident of the Zone before the days of de
Lesseps and at our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled under
that pseudonym, alleging it his real name. Upstairs above his store all
was sepulchral silence when I mounted to investigate--and I came
quickly and quietly down again; for the door had opened on the gaudy
Oriental splendor of a joss-house where dwelt only grinning wooden
idols not counted as Zone residents by the materialistic census
officials. On the Isthmus as elsewhere "John" is a law-abiding
citizen--within limits; never obsequious, nearly always friendly, ready
to answer questions quite cheerily so long as he considers the matter
any of your business, but closing infinitely tighter than the
maltreated bivalve when he fancies you are prying too far.

In time I reached the Commissary--the government department store--and
enrolled it from cash-desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward
to scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography; the police station
on its knoll fell like the rest. I went to jail--and set down a large
score of black men and a pair of European whites, back from a day's
sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in unaccustomed
cleanliness in the heart of the lower story of a fresh wooden building
with light iron bars, easy to break out of were it not that policemen,
white and black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Empire not
only faces her streets but even her back yards are filled with shacks
and inhabited boxes to be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered
outskirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old abandoned
junk,--locomotives, cars, dredges, boilers (some with the letters "U.
S." painted upon them, which sight gave some three-day investigator
material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste); all now soon to be