accustomed paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary,
hospital and police station, all ruled over and held in check by
the famous "Colonel" in command of the latter. Moreover Paraiso
will some day come again into her own, when the "relocation" opens
and brings her back on the main line, while proud Culebra and
haughty Empire, stranded on a railless shore of the canal, will
wither and waste away and even their broad macadamed roads will
sink beneath a second-growth jungle.

Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negro
cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of
hills, for Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now
and was not exactly in a condition to interview American
housewives. My own task began down at the row of inhabited box-
cars, and so on through shacks and tenements with many Spanish
laborers' wives. Then toward noon the labor-train screamed in,
with two "gold" coaches and many open cattle-cars with long
benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six hundred men in the
six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood through a
suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and shrieked
away again.

Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds
of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-
mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough
and tumble food--yet so different from the old French catch as
catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all
through the noon-hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We
jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so
abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the place where