On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun that will also soon be lake bottom, we found a native shack transformed into the headquarters of a scientific expedition.  We sat down to a frontier lunch which called for none of the excuses made for it by Y——­ when he appeared in his dripping full-dress and joined us without even bothering to change his water-spurting shoes.  In his boxes he had carefully stuck away side by side an untold number of members of the mosquito family.  Queer vocation; but then, any vocation is good that gives an excuse to live out in this wild tropical world.

By one we had Dr. O——­ aboard and were waving farewell to the camp.  The return, of course, was not the equal of the outward trip; even nature cannot duplicate so perfect a thing.  But two raging showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under another aspect, and between them we awakened vast rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by shooting at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that would have killed an elephant.

It is not hard to realize why the bush native does not love the American.  Put yourself in his breechclout.  Suppose a throng of unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere you did not know.  Suppose a representative of that unsympathetic government came snorting down upon you one day in a wild fearful invention they called a motor-boat, as you were lolling under the thatch roof your grandfather built, and cried: 

“Come on!  Get out of here!  We’re going to burn your house and turn this country into a lake.”

Flood the land which was your great-grand-father’s, the spot where you used to play leap-frog under the banana trees, the jungle lane where your mother’s courtship days were passed and the ceiga tree under which she was wedded—­if matters were ever carried to that ceremonious length.  What though this foreign nation gave you a bag of peculiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you had never seen a score of such coins in your life and barely knew the use of them, being acquainted with life only as it is picked from a mango-tree?  The foreigners had cried, “Take this money and go buy a farm somewhere else,” and you looked around you and saw all the world you had ever really known the existence of sinking beneath the rising waters.  Where would you go, think you, to buy that new farm?  Even if you fled and found another unknown land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, having not the remotest idea how to live in a town with only pieces of metal to get food out of instead of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house your grandfather built ever since you were born and dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry?  To say the least you would be some peeved.