tank. I scrambled over tenders and quarter-miles of "Lidgerwood
flats" piled high with broken rock and earth, to scream at the
American conductor and his black brakemen, often to find myself,
by the time I had set down one of them, carried entirely out of my
district, to Pedro Miguel or beyond the Chagres, and have to "hit
the grit" in "hobo" fashion and catch something back to the spot
where I left off. In short I poked into every corner of the "cut"
known to man, bawling in the November-first voice of a
presidential candidate to everything in trousers:

"Eh! 'Ad yer census taken yet?"

And what was my reward? From the northern edge of Empire to where
the "cut" sinks away into the Chagres and the low, flat country
beyond, I enrolled--just thirteen persons. It was then and there,
though it still lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a
census enumerator. With slow and deliberate step I climbed out of
the canal and across a pathed field to Bas Obispo and, sitting
down in the shade of her station, patiently awaited the train that
would carry me back to Empire.

Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I
enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented.
Martinique negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some
eighty per cent illiterate; of some three hundred of the first
only a half dozen even claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock
was virtually universal among them.

Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states and