inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a black alpaca coat
of many wrinkles; and an unassuming straw hat, a white-haired man
with blue--almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from his
lips as he strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There
has been no flash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone
since the French sailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel"
for all that, the soldier who has never "seen service," who has
never heard the shrapnel scream by overhead, yet to whom the world
owes more thanks than six conquering generals rolled into one.

Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of
deafening machines run by compressed air brought from miles away,
are pounding and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock.
After them will presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs
of the ubiquitous black "powder-men" and carelessly throw down
boxes of dynamite and pound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp
them down ready to "blow" at 11:30 and 5:30 when the workmen are
out of range,--those mighty explosions that twelve times a week
set the porch chairs of every I.C.C. house on the Isthmus to
rocking, and are heard far out at sea.

Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and jangling that I
must bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire
gamut of sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the
powerful Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel.
Down in the bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that
shuts off the breeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of
the chasm above, the trees are always nodding and bowing before
the ceaseless wind from off the Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros"
drowse under their sheet-iron wigwams, erected not so much as