weird smile, nodding his head slightly toward an unpainted shelf
made of pieces of dynamite boxes, "Mine and my room-mates." The
shelf was filled with four--REAL Barcelona paper editions of
Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen others accustomed
to sit in the same company, all dog-eared with much reading.

"Some ambitious foreman," I mused, and went on with my queries:

"Occupation?"

"Pico y pala," he answered.

"Pick and shovel!" I exclaimed--"and read those?"

"No importa," he answered, again with that elusive shadow of a
smile, "It doesn't matter," and as I rose to leave, "Buenos dias,
senor," and he turned again to his reading.

I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, putting my
questions and setting down the answers without even hearing them,
my thoughts still back in the clean, bare room behind, wondering
whether I should not have been wiser after all to have ignored the
sharp-drawn lines and the prejudices of my fellow-countrymen and
joined the pick and shovel Zone world. There might have been pay
dirt there. A few months before, I remembered, a Spanish laborer
killed in a dynamite explosion in the "cut" had turned out to be
one of Spain's most celebrated lawyers. I recalled that EL UNICO,
the anarchist Spanish weekly published in Miraflores contains some
crystal-clear thinking set forth in a sharp-cut manner that shows
a real inside knowledge of the "job" and the canal workers,