Well on in the morning there was a general gathering of all the ditch-digging clans of Empire and vicinity in a broad field close under the eaves of the town, and soon there came drifting across to me at my labor, hoarse, frenzied screams; sounding strangely incongruous beneath the swaying palm-trees;

    “Come on!  Get down with his arm!  Aaaaahrrr!”

But my time was well chosen.  In the Spanish camps above the canal, still and silent with Sunday, men at no other time to be run to earth were entrapped in their bunks, under their dwelling-places in the shade, shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday clothes, reminiscing over far-off homes and pre-migratory days, or merely loafing.  The same cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows they were as in their native land, even the few Italians and rare Portuguese scattered among them inoculated with their cheerfulness.

Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques, a sort of wild, untamed creature, who spoke a distressing imitation of French which even he did not for a moment claim to be such, but frankly dubbed patois.  Restless-eyed black men who answered to their names only at the question “Cummun t’appelle?” and give their age only to those who open wide their mouths and cry, “Caje-vous?” Then on again to the no less strange, sing-song “English” of Jamaica, the whining tones of those whose island trees the conquesting Spaniards found bearded—­“barbados”—­now and again a more or less dark Costa Rican, Guatemalteco, Venezuelan, stray islanders from St. Vincent, Trinidad, or Guadalupe, individuals defying classification.  But the chief reward for denying myself a holiday were the “back-calls” in the town itself which I was able to check out of my field-book.  Many a long-sought negro I roused from his holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calico curtains to pound him awake—­mere auricular demonstration having only the effect of lulling him into deeper child-like slumber.  The surest and often only effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently on the soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate instrument such as my tack-hammer, or a convenient broom-handle or flat-iron.  Frequently I came upon young negro men of the age and type that in white skins would have been loafing on pool-room corners, reading to themselves in loud and solemn voices from the Bible, with a far-away look in their eyes; always I was surrounded by a never-broken babble of voices, for the West Indian negro can let his face run unceasingly all the day through, and the night, though he have never a word to say.

Thus my “enumerated” tags spread further and wider over the city of Empire.  I reached in due time the hodge-podge shops and stores of Railroad Avenue.  Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, there appeared such names as Carmen Wah Chang, cooks and waitresses living in darksome back cupboards must be unearthed, negro shoemakers were caught at their stands on the sidewalks, shiny-haired bartenders