Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond all future question how much more native intelligence has the white man.  Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still less ask him to repeat the answer.  His replies came back sharp and swift as a pelota from a cesta.  West Indians not only must hear the question an average of three times but could seldom give the simplest information clearly enough to be intelligible, though ostensibly speaking English.  A Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his racial torpor.  Yet of the Spaniards on the Zone surely seventy per cent, were wholly illiterate, while the negroes from the British Weat Indies, thanks to their good fortune in being ruled over by the world’s best colonist, could almost invariably read and write; many of those shoveling in the “cut” have been trained in trigonometry.

Few are the “Zoners” now who do not consider the Spaniard the best workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the railroad surveying to the completion of the canal.  The stocky, muscle-bound little fellows come no longer to America as conquistadores, but to shovel dirt.  And yet more cheery, willing workers, more law-abiding subjects are scarcely to be found.  It is unfortunate we could not have imported Spaniards for all the canal work; even they have naturally learned some “soldiering” from the example of lazy negroes who, where laborers must be had, are a bit better than no labor—­though not much.

The third day came, and high above me towered the rock cliffs of Culebra’s palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit in echelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock “slide” dribbling warningly down.  He who still fancies the digging of the canal an ordinary task should have tramped with us through just our section, halting to speak to every man in it, climbing out of this man-made canon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its ends, while at Culebra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain walls on either side.

From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are making light of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up their great disasters by a strict censorship of news.  The latter is mere absurdity.  As to catastrophies, a great “slide” or a premature dynamite explosion are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to Europeans.  But whereas the continental European would sit down before the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his hands, and pitches in to shovel the “slide” out again.  He isn’t belittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got to be dug and goes ahead and digs it.  That is the greatest thing on the Zone.  Amid all the childish snarling of “Spigoties,” the back-biting of Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man on the job,—­“the Colonel,” the average American, the “rough-neck”—­goes right on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumor of all this outside noise.