reason for postponing the enumerating: "If you'd butt in on one o'
them Martinique booze festivals they'd crown you with a bottle."

Already one or two enumerators had gone back to private life--by
request. Particularly sad was the case of our dainty, blue-blooded
Panamanian. As with many Panamanians, and not a few of the self-
exalted elsewhere, he was more burdened with blue corpuscles than
with gray matter. At any rate--

On our cards, after the query "Color?" was a small space, a very
small space in which was to be written quite briefly and
unceremoniously "W," "B," or "Mx" as the case might be. Uncle Sam
was in a hurry for his census. Early one afternoon our Panamanian
helpmate burst upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives in
his royal thatched domains in the ancestral bush. When he had
embraced him the customary fifteen times on the right side and the
fifteen accustomed times on the left side, and had performed the
eighty-five gestures of greeting required by the social manual of
the bush, and asked the three hundred and sixty-five questions de
rigueur regarding the honorable health of his honorable horde of
offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his
hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of precisely the
same shade of complexion as himself. Could he set him down as he
had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a
precedent that might result in his own mortification? Yet could he
stretch a shade--or several shades--and set him down as "white"?
No, there was the oath of office, and the government that
administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. Long he
sat in deepest meditation. Being a Panamanian, he could not of
course know that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Till at