-o'clock teas and
keeps two servants will find life different when the canal is opened
and she moves back to the smoky little factory cottage and learns again
to do her own washing.

At work, "on the job" there is a genuine American freedom of
wear-what-you-please and a general habit of going where you choose in
working clothes. That is one of the incomprehensible Zone things to the
little veneered Panamanian. He cannot rid himself of his racial
conviction that a man in an old khaki jacket who is building a canal
must be of inferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat and a tall
hat. The real "Spig" could never do any real work for fear of soiling
his clothes. He cannot get used to the plain, brusk American type
without embroidery, who just does things in his blunt, efficient way
without wasting time on little exterior courtesies. None of these
childish countries is man enough to see through the rough surface. Even
with seven years of American example about him the Panamanian has not
yet grasped the divinity of labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when he
has grown nearer true civilization.

But among Americans off the job reminiscences of East India flock in
again. D, who is a quartermaster at $225, may be on
"How-are-you-old-man?" terms with G, who is a station agent and draws
$175. But Mrs. D never thinks of calling on Mrs. G socially. H and J,
who are engineer and cranemen respectively on the same steam-shovel,
are probably "Hank" and "Jim" to each other, but Mrs. H would be
horrified to find herself at the same dance with Mrs. J. Mrs. X, whose
husband is a foreman at $165, and whose dining table is a full six
inches longer and whose ice-box will hold one more cold-storage
chicken, would not think of sitting in at bridge with Mrs. Y, whose
husband gets $150. As for being black, or any tint but pure "white"!
Even an Englishman, though he may eat in the same hotel if his skin is
not too tanned, is accepted on staring suffrance. As for the man whose
skin is a bit dull, he might sit on the steps of an I. C. C. hotel with
dollars dribbling out of his pockets until he starved to death--and he
would be duly buried in the particular grave to which his color
entitled him. A real American place is the Zone, with outward democracy
and inward caste, an unenthusiastic and afraid-to-break-the-conventions
place in play, and the opposite at work.

Yet with it all it is a good place in which to live. There you have
always summer