instead of the painful, puerile screech that had recently assailed
my ear, I all but forgot I was in a foreign land. The fact was
recalled by the passing of the train-guard,--an erect and self-
possessed young American in "Texas" hat, khaki uniform, and
leather leggings, striding along the aisle with a jerking, half-
arrogant swing of the shoulders. So, perhaps, might I too soon be
parading across the Isthmus! It was not, to be sure, exactly the
role I had planned to play on the Zone. I had come rather with the
hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with
other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand
and boast, "I helped dig IT." But that was in the callow days
before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates the
sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world.
Besides, had I not always wanted to be a policeman and twirl a
club and stalk with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had
first stared speechless upon one of those noble beings on my first
trip out into the world twenty-one years before?

It was not without effort that I rose in time next morning to
continue on the 6:37 from Corozal across another bit of the Zone.
Exactly thus should one first see the Great Work, piece-meal,
slowly; unless he will go home with it all in an undigested lump.
The train rolled across a stretch of almost uninhabited country,
with a vast plain of broken rock on the right, plunged
unexpectedly through a short tunnel, and stopped at a station
perched on the edge of a ridge above a small Zone town backed by
some vast structure, above which here and there a huge crane
loomed against the sky of dawn. Another mile and the collectors
were announcing as brazenly as if they challenged the few "Spigs"
on board to correct them, "Peter M'Gill! Peter M'Gill!" We were