rose to switch off the light and turned in again.

The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were spattering from them
when I passed again the jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and
machinery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by green
jungle strands and tropical creepers. By day the arch-roofed
labor-camps were silent and empty, but for a lonely janitor
languidly mopping a floor. Before the buildings a black gang was
dipping the canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by one into a great
kettle of scalding water. But there are also "married quarters" at
Cunette. A row of six government houses tops the ridge, with six
families in each house, and--no, I dare not risk nomination to an
ever expanding though unpopular club by stating how many in a
family. I will venture merely to assert that when noon-time came I
was not well started on the second house, yet carried away more
than sixty filled-out cards.

More than two days that single row of houses endured, varied by
nights spent with "the boss" in the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra
way. Then one morning I tramped far out the highway to the old
Scotchman's farm-house that bounds Empire on the north and began
the long intricate journey through the private-owned town itself.
It was like attending a congress of the nations, a museum
exhibition of all the shapes and hues in which the human vegetable
grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shanties swarming with exhibits
monopolized the landscape; strange the room that did not yield up
at least a man and woman and three or four children. Day after
blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, ironing-boards,
veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and again
descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and ungraceful