I am, sir, very truly yours,

(Mrs.) Henry Peck.

P. S. The mosquito may be easily recognized by a peculiarly triumphant, defiant note in his song,

I cannot personally vouch for the above, but if it was received any “Zoner” will assure you that prompt action was taken.  It is well so.  The French failed to dig the canal because they could not down the mosquito.  Of course there was the champagne and the other things that come with it—­later in the night.  But after all it was the little songful mosquito that drove them in disgrace back across the Atlantic.

Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight lunch there was one house that was usually worth lingering before, though good music is rare on the Zone.  Then there was the naughty poker game in bachelor quarters number—­well, never mind that detail—­to keep an ear on in case the pot grew large enough to make a worth-while violation of the law that would warrant the summoning of the mounted patrolman.

Meanwhile “cases” stacked up about me.  Now one took me out the hard U. S. highway that, once out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambles erratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through the half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rooted life and almost noisy with the songs of birds.  Eventually within a couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement and descended to Mt.  Hope police station, where there is a ’phone with which to “get in touch” again and then a Mission rocker on the screened veranda where the breezes of the near-by Atlantic will have you well cooled off before you can catch the shuttle-train back to Gatun.

Or another led out across the lake by the old abandoned line that was the main line when first I saw Gatun.  It drops down beyond the station and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam-shovels were already devouring, toward forsaken Bohio.  Picking its way across the rotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle, all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes torn up and carried away, while already the parrots screamed again in derision as if it were they who had driven out the hated civilization and taken possession again of their own.  A few short months and the devouring jungle will have swallowed up even the place where it has been.

If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the disappearance of a half-dozen jacks from the dam, every case called for full investigation.  For days to come I might fight my way through the encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut for miles around to see if by any chance the lost property could have rolled thither.  More than once such a hunt brought me out on the water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles of impenetrable jungle behind and above chanting with invisible life, to the right the filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges dimly outlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and all Gatun and its immense works and workers below and before me.