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.

It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand
for inspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a--quite innocent and
legal--card game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches,
dog-eared wads of every species of literature from real estate
pamphlets to locomotive journals, and a further mass of
indiscriminate matter that none but a professional inventory man
would attempt to classify. About the room was the usual clutter of
all manner of things in the usual unarranged, "unwomaned" Zone
way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty nor
privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau
were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent
employee, who had left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging
up his shirt--after the fashion of "Zoners." So when I had wiped
away the dust that had been gathering thereon since the days of de
Lesseps and chucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was
settled,--a full-fledged Zone employee in the quarters to which
every man on the "gold roll" is entitled free of charge.

Just here it may be well to explain that the I. C. C. has very