constant breeze are park benches where one can sit with the
Atlantic spreading away to infinity before, breaking with its
ages-old, mysterious roll on the shore just as it did before the
European's white sails first broke the gleaming skyline. Out to
sea runs the growing breakwater from Toro Point, the great
wireless tower, yet just across the bay on a little jutting,
dense-grown tongue of land is the jungle hut of a jungle family as
utterly untouched by civilization as was the verdant valley of
Typee on the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into it
from the hills above.

But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours of unbroken sleep
the heavy mental toil of enumeration requires. Free government
bachelor quarters makes strange bed-fellows--or at least room-
fellows. Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I
might have been assigned quarters upon the financial knoll where
habits and hours were a bit more in keeping with my own. But a
bachelor is a bachelor on the Zone, and though he be clerk to his
highness "the Colonel" himself he may find himself carelessly
tossed into a "rough-neck" brotherhood.

House 47 was distinctly an abode of "rough-necks." A "rough-neck,"
it may be essential to explain to those who never ate at the same
table with one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed,
cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing
steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night through with various
starred Hennessey and its rivals, and continue that round
indefinitely without once failing to turn up to straddle his beam
in the morning. He seems to have been created without the
insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in "nerve." He is