"When and where?"

"In Spanish Town, Jamaica, three year ago, sah."

Which was not an attempt to be facetious but an answer in all
seriousness. Why should not one census, like one baptism, suffice
for a life-time? It was fortunate that enumerators were not
accustomed to carry deadly weapons.

Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond all
future question how much more native intelligence has the white
man. Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still
less ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and
swift as a pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear
the question an average of three times but could seldom give the
simplest information clearly enough to be intelligible, though
ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one might fill out and
be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his
racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards on the Zone surely seventy per
cent, were wholly illiterate, while the negroes from the British
Weat Indies, thanks to their good fortune in being ruled over by
the world's best colonist, could almost invariably read and write;
many of those shoveling in the "cut" have been trained in
trigonometry.

Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the best
workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the
railroad surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky,
muscle-bound little fellows come no longer to America as