ponderously upon him.

The amusements in Empire are few--and not especially amusing.
There is really only one unfailing one. That is slid in glass
receptacles across a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad
Avenue opposite Empire Machine Shops. So it happened that "Shorty"
was gradually winning the title of a thirty-third degree "booze-
fighter," and passengers on any afternoon train who took the
trouble to glance in at a wide-open door just Atlanticward of the
station might have beheld him with his back to the track and one
foot slightly raised and resting lightly and with the nonchalance
of long practice on a gas-pipe that had missed its legitimate
mission. In fact "Shorty" had come to that point where he would
rather be caught in church than found dead without a bottle on
him, and arriving home overflowing with joy about midnight slept
away most of the day in 47 that he might spend as much of the
night as the early closing laws of the Zone permitted at the
amusement headquarters of Empire.

With these few hints of the life that raged beneath the roof of 47
it may perhaps be comprehensible, without going into detail, why I
came to contemplate a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I
have small use for any but the man who will take his allotted
share with the rest of the world without either whining or
snarling. Yet when an official government census enumerator falls
asleep on the edge of a tenement washtub with a question dead on
his lips, or solemnly sets down a crow-black Jamaican as "white,"
it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and time for correction.

But it is one thing for a Canal Zone employee to resolve to move,