At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the crowd had wolfed and melted away.  An odd half dozen more, perhaps, we found stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighboring quarters before the imperative screech of the labor-train whistle ended a scene that must be several times repeated, and now left us silent and alone, to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor quarters, there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble of words in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its proper shelf.

Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator’s greatest problem.  The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of ten fluently familiar with his companion’s antecedents and pedigree.  He can generally furnish all the information the census department calls for.  But it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor.  He may know his room-mate’s exact degree of skill at poker, he probably knows his private opinion of “the Colonel,” he is sure to know his degree of enmity to the prohibition movement; but he is not at all certain to know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when and in what particular corner of the States he began the game of existence.  So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man’s room-mate might go off into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him for a week.  Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of “Zoners,” with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our own heads only.  No wanderer of experience would dream of asking his fellow where he came from.  The answer would be too apt to be, “from the last place.”  So difficult did this matter become that I gave up rushing for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressing necessity of catching that premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire and, packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraiso that I might spend the first half of the night in quest of these elusive bits of bachelor information.

Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated.  I had my first experience enumerating “gold” married quarters—­white American families; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely.  The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter.  The wives of locomotive engineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently supercilious ladies who resented being disturbed during their “social functions” and lacked the training in politeness of Jamaican “mammies.”  Living in Paradise now under a paternal all-providing government, they seemed to have forgotten the rolling-pin days of the past.  It was here in Paraiso that I first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom of lying about one’s age.  Negro women never did.  What more absurd, uncalled-for piece of dishonesty!  Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones next door will