dressed more like a miner, though his “front” and “hind” negro brakemen were as apt to be in silk ties and patent-leathers.  To say nothing of the train-loads that go Atlanticward and to jungle “dumps” and to many an unnoticed “fill.”  Then when he had thus watched the day through it would have been of interest to go and chat with some of the “Old Timers” who live here beside the track and who have seen, or at least heard, this same endless stream of rock and earth race by six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year for six years, as constant and heavily-laden to-day as in the beginning.  He might discover, as not all his fellow-countrymen have as yet, that the little surgical operation on Mother Earth we are engaged in is no mule job.

The week-end gave me time to get back in touch with affairs in the States among the newspaper files at the Y. M. C. A. building.  Uncle Sam surely makes life comfortable for his children wherever he takes hold.  It is not enough that he shall clean up and set in order these tropical pest-holes; he will have the employee fancy himself completely at home.  Here I sat in one of the dozen big airy recreation halls, well stocked with man’s playthings, which the government has erected on the Zone; I, who two weeks before had been thankful for lodging on the earth floor of a Honduranean hut.  The Y. M. C. A. is the chief social center on the Isthmus, the rendezvous and leisure-hour headquarters of the thousands that inhabit bachelor quarters—­except the few of the purely barroom type.  “Everybody’s Association” it might perhaps more properly be called, for ladies find welcome and the laughter of children over the parlor games is rarely lacking.  It is not the circumspect place that are many of its type in the States, but a real man’s place where he can buy his cigarettes and smoke his pipe in peace, a place for men as men are, not as the fashion plates that mama’s fond imagination pictures them.  With all its excellences it would be unjust to complain that the Zone “Y.  M.” is a trifle “low-brow” in its tastes, that the books on its shelves are apt to be “popular” novels rather than reading matter, that its phonographs are most frequently screeching vaudeville noises while the Slezak and Homer disks lie tucked away far down near the bottom of the stack.

With the new week I moved to Empire, the “Rules and Regulations” in a pocket and the most indispensable of my possessions under an arm.  Once more we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through a mole-hill, past her concrete light-house among the astonished palms, and her giant hose of water wiping away the rock hills, across the trestleless bridge with its photographic glimpse of the canal before and behind for the limber-necked, and again I found myself in the metropolis of the Canal Zone.  At the quartermaster’s office my “application for quarters” was duly filed without a word and a slip assigning me to Room 3, House 47, as silently returned.  I climbed by a stone-faced U. S. road to my new home on the slope of a ridge overlooking the railway and its buildings below.