Already one or two enumerators had gone back to private life—­by request.  Particularly sad was the case of our dainty, blue-blooded Panamanian.  As with many Panamanians, and not a few of the self-exalted elsewhere, he was more burdened with blue corpuscles than with gray matter.  At any rate—­

On our cards, after the query “Color?” was a small space, a very small space in which was to be written quite briefly and unceremoniously “W,” “B,” or “Mx” as the case might be.  Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census.  Early one afternoon our Panamanian helpmate burst upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives in his royal thatched domains in the ancestral bush.  When he had embraced him the customary fifteen times on the right side and the fifteen accustomed times on the left side, and had performed the eighty-five gestures of greeting required by the social manual of the bush, and asked the three hundred and sixty-five questions de rigueur regarding the honorable health of his honorable horde of offspring, and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of precisely the same shade of complexion as himself.  Could he set him down as he had many a mere red-blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a precedent that might result in his own mortification?  Yet could he stretch a shade—­or several shades—­and set him down as “white”?  No, there was the oath of office, and the government that administered it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed.  Long he sat in deepest meditation.  Being a Panamanian, he could not of course know that Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census.  Till at length, as the sun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a scintillating idea rewarded his unwonted cogitation.  He caught up the medium soft pencil and wrote in aristocratic hand down across the sheet where other information is supposed to find place: 

“Color;—­A very light mixture,” and taking his leave with the requisite seventy-five gestures and genuflexions, he drifted Empireward with the dozen cards the day had yielded.

Which is why I was shocked next morning by the disrespectful report of Renson that “my friend the boss had tied a can to the Spig’s tail,” and our dainty and lamented comrade went back to the more fitting blue-blood occupation of swinging a cane in the lobbies of Panama’s famous hostelries.

But what mattered such small losses?  Had not “Scotty” been engaged to fill the breach—­or all of them, one or two breaches more or less made small difference to “Scotty.”  He was a cozy little barrel of a man, born in “Doombahrton,” and for some years past had been dispensing good old Dumbarton English in Panama’s proudest educational institution.  But Panama’s school vacation is during her “summer,” her dry season from February to April.  What more natural then than that “Scotty” should have concluded to pass his vacation taking census, for obviously—­“a mon must pick up a wee bit o’ change wherever he can.”