bookcase and a stable of riding horses, and cause to be erected on
the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers might come and
bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement.

There are men in the Z. P. who in former years have played horse
with the startled markets of great American cities; men whose
voices will boom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in
the professional in years to come; men whom doting parents have
sent to Harvard--on whom it failed to take, except on their
clothes--men who have gone down into the Valley of the Shadow of
Death and crawled on hands and knees through the brackish red brook
that runs at the bottom and come out again smiling on the brink
above. Careers more varied than Mexican sombreros one might hear
in any Z. P. squad-room--were not the Z. P. so much more given to
action than to autobiography.

They bore little resemblance to what I had expected. My mental
picture of an American policeman was that conglomerate average one
unconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and
by comparison with foreign,--a heavy-footed, discourteous, half-
fanatical, half-irreligious clubber whose wits are as slow as his
judgment is honest. Instead of which I found the Z. P. composed
almost without exception of good-hearted, well set up young
Americans almost all of military training. I had anticipated, from
other experiences, a constant bickering and a general striving to
make life unendurable for a new-comer. Instead I was constantly
surprised at the good fellowship that existed throughout the
force. There were of course some healthy rivalries; there were no
angels among them--or I should have fled the Isthmus much earlier;
but for the most part the Z. P. resembled nothing so much as a big