the haughty station commander, occupied the parlor suite beside
the office. That was all, except the black Trinidadian boy who sat
on the wooden shelf that was his bed behind a huge padlocked door
and gazed dreamily out through the bars--when he was not carrying
a bundle to the train for his wardens or engaged in the janitor
duties that kept Corozal station so spick and span. Oh! To be sure
there were also a couple of negro policemen in the smaller room
behind the thin wooden partition of our own, but negro policemen
scarcely count in Zone Police reckonings.

"By Heck! They must use a lot o' mules t' haul aout all thet
dirt," observed an Arkansas farmer to his nephew, home from the
Zone on vacation. He would have thought so indeed could he have
spent a day at Corozal and watched the unbroken deafening
procession of dirt-trains scream by on their way to the Pacific,--
straining Moguls dragging a furlong of "Lidgerwood flats," swaying
"Oliver dumps" with their side chains clanking, a succession as
incessant of "empties" grinding back again into the midst of the
fray. On the tail of every train lounged an American conductor,
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