Wherever on the Zone you espy a town of two-story skeleton screened buildings scattered over hills, with winding gravel roads and trees and flowers between there you may be sure live American “gold” employees.  Yet somehow the Canal Commission had dodged the monotony you expected, somehow they have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal the best-intentioned factory town.  There are hints that the builders have heard somewhere of the science of landscape gardening.  At times these same houses are deceiving, for all I. C. C. buildings bear a strong family resemblance, and it is only at the door that you know whether it is bachelors’ quarters, a family residence, or the supreme court.

From the outside world “P’reeso” scarcely draws a glance of attention; but once in it you find a whole Zone town with all the accustomed paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary, hospital and police station, all ruled over and held in check by the famous “Colonel” in command of the latter.  Moreover Paraiso will some day come again into her own, when the “relocation” opens and brings her back on the main line, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a railless shore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broad macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle.

Renson had come to lend assistance.  He set to work among the negro cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso’s amphitheater of hills, for Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now and was not exactly in a condition to interview American housewives.  My own task began down at the row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacks and tenements with many Spanish laborers’ wives.  Then toward noon the labor-train screamed in, with two “gold” coaches and many open cattle-cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood through a suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and shrieked away again.

Renson and I dashed for the laborers’ mess-halls, where hundreds of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble food—­yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch.  We jotted them down at express speed, with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confused chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot dictionary.  Then suddenly I landed a Russian!  It was the final straw.  I like to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating “French” of Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I will not run the risk of talking Russian.  It was the second and last case during my census days when I was forced to call for interpretative assistance.