f Washington Hotel." It is merely a softer way of saying, "Only
white Americans with money can bathe here."

Then beyond are the great hospitals, second only to those of Ancon, the
"white" wards built out over the sea, and behind them the "black" where
the negroes must be content with second-hand breezes. Some of the costs
of the canal are here,--sturdy black men in a sort of bed-tick pajamas
sitting on the verandas or in wheel chairs, some with one leg gone,
some with both. One could not but wonder how it feels to be hopelessly
ruined in body early in life for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign
power that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not a
whistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives
rusting away in the jungle.

Under the beautiful royal palms beyond, all bent inland in the constant
breeze are park benches where one can sit with the Atlantic spreading
away to infinity before, breaking with its ages-old, mysterious roll on
the shore just as it did before the European's white sails first broke
the gleaming skyline. Out to sea runs the growing breakwater from Toro
Point, the great wireless tower, yet just across the bay on a little
jutting, dense-grown tongue of land is the jungle hut of a jungle
family as utterly untouched by civilization as was the verdant valley
of Typee on the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into it from
the hills above.

But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours of unbroken sleep the
heavy mental toil of enumeration requires. Free government bachelor
quarters makes strange bed-fellows--or at least room-fellows.
Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I might have been
assigned quarters upon the financial knoll where habits and hours were
a bit more in keeping with my own. But a bachelor is a bachelor on the
Zone, and though he be clerk to his highness "the Colonel" himself he
may find himself carelessly tossed into a "rough-neck" brotherhood.

House 47 was distinctly an abode of "rough-necks." A "rough-neck," it
may be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same table
with one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, cast-iron
fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing steam-shovel
all day, wrestle the night through with various starred Hennessey and
its rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without once failing
to turn up to straddle his beam in the morning. He seems to have been
created