t is not the circumspect place that
are many of its type in the States, but a real man's place where he can
buy his cigarettes and smoke his pipe in peace, a place for men as men
are, not as the fashion plates that mama's fond imagination pictures
them. With all its excellences it would be unjust to complain that the
Zone "Y. M." is a trifle "low-brow" in its tastes, that the books on
its shelves are apt to be "popular" novels rather than reading matter,
that its phonographs are most frequently screeching vaudeville noises
while the Slezak and Homer disks lie tucked away far down near the
bottom of the stack.

With the new week I moved to Empire, the "Rules and Regulations" in a
pocket and the most indispensable of my possessions under an arm. Once
more we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through a mole-hill, past her
concrete light-house among the astonished palms, and her giant hose of
water wiping away the rock hills, across the trestleless bridge with
its photographic glimpse of the canal before and behind for the
limber-necked, and again I found myself in the metropolis of the Canal
Zone. At the quartermaster's office my "application for quarters" was
duly filed without a word and a slip assigning me to Room 3, House 47,
as silently returned. I climbed by a stone-faced U. S. road to my new
home on the slope of a ridge overlooking the railway and its buildings
below.

It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, therefore, were on hand for
inspection, sprawlingly engrossed in a--quite innocent and legal--card
game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches, dog-eared wads
of every species of literature from real estate pamphlets to locomotive
journals, and a further mass of indiscriminate matter that none but a
professional inventory man would attempt to classify. About the room
was the usual clutter of all manner of things in the usual unarranged,
"unwomaned" Zone way, which the negro janitor feels it neither his duty
nor privilege to bring to order; while on and about my cot and bureau
were helter-skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent employee, who
had left for his six-weeks' vacation without hanging up his
shirt--after the fashion of "Zoners." So when I had wiped away the dust
that had been gathering thereon since the days of de Lesseps and
chucked my odds and ends into a bureau drawer, I was settled,--a
full-fledged Zone employee in the quarters to which every man on the
"gold roll" is entitled free