In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his wife and had him
placed under arrest. The negro: "Why, boss, can't a man chastize
his wife when she desarves and needs it?"

Dr. O---: "Not on the Canal Zone. It's against the law."

Negro (in great astonishment): "Is dat so, boss. Den ah'll never
do it again, boss--on de Canal Zone."

One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not unlike that of a
rocky waterfall began to grow upon my ear. Louder and louder it
swelled as I worked slowly forward. At last I discovered its
source. In a lower room of a tenement an old white-haired Jamaican
had fitted up a private school, to which the elite among the
darker brethren sent their children, rather than patronize the
common public schools Uncle Sam provides free to all Zone
residents. The old man sat before some twenty wide-eyed children,
one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, book in hand, in the center
of the room, and at regular intervals of not more than twenty
seconds he shouted high above all other noises of the
neighborhood:

"Yo calls dat Eng-leesh! How eber yo gon' l'arn talk proper lika
dat, yo tell me?"

Far back in the interior of an Empire block I came upon an old,
old negro woman, parchment-skinned and doddering, living alone in
a stoop-shouldered shanty of boxes and tin cans. "Ah don' know how
ol' ah is, mahster," was one of her replies, "but ah born six
years befo' de cholera diskivered."