me Yankee the minute I laid eyes on you.'

"'Don't reopen the chasm, Doc,' I begs him. 'Any Yankeeness I may
have is geographical; and, as far as I am concerned, a Southerner is
as good as a Filipino any day. I'm feeling to bad too argue. Let's
have secession without misrepresentation, if you say so; but what I
need is more laudanum and less Lundy's Lane. If you're mixing that
compound gefloxide of gefloxicum for me, please fill my ears with it
before you get around to the battle of Gettysburg, for there is a
subject full of talk.'

"By this time Doc Millikin had thrown up a line of fortifications on
square pieces of paper; and he says to me: 'Yank, take one of these
powders every two hours. They won't kill you. I'll be around again
about sundown to see if you're alive.'

"Old Doc's powders knocked the chagres. I stayed in San Juan,
and got to knowing him better. He was from Mississippi, and the
red-hottest Southerner that ever smelled mint. He made Stonewall
Jackson and R. E. Lee look like Abolitionists. He had a family
somewhere down near Yazoo City; but he stayed away from the States
on account of an uncontrollable liking he had for the absence of
a Yankee government. Him and me got as thick personally as the
Emperor of Russia and the dove of peace, but sectionally we didn't
amalgamate.

"'Twas a beautiful system of medical practice introduced by old Doc
into that isthmus of land. He'd take that bracket-saw and the mild
chloride and his hypodermic, and treat anything from yellow fever to
a personal friend.

"Besides his other liabilities Doc could play a flute for a minute
or two. He was guilty of two tunes--'Dixie' and another one that
was mighty close to the 'Suwanee River'--you might say one of its
tributaries. He used to come down and sit with me while I was
getting well, and aggrieve his flute and say unreconstructed things
about the North. You'd have thought that the smoke from the first
gun at Fort Sumter was still floating around in the air.

"You know that was about the time they staged them property
revolutions down there, that wound up in the fifth act with the
thrilling canal scene where Uncle Sam has nine curtain-calls holding
Miss Panama by the hand, while the bloodhounds keep Senator Morgan
treed up in a cocoanut-palm.

"That's the way it wound up; but at first it seemed as if Colombia
was going to make Panama look like one of the $3.98 kind, with dents
made in it in the factory, like they we