and jar of steam-shovels and trains still stretching away
endless in either direction. Here as in the world at large generations
of us may come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels at the
rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains for the Pacific goes
unbrokenly on, as the world and its work will continue without a pause
when we are gone indeed.

Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths of all this labor will
be submerged and forever hidden from view. The swift growth of the
tropics will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels, and
palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through what will seem
almost a natural channel. Then blase travelers lolling in their deck
chairs will gaze about them and snort:

"Huh! Is that all we got for nine years' work and half a billion
dollars?" They will have forgotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon,
forgotten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and graduate nurses,
the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to
the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the
entire P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely
for oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand
and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet
that leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the
canal is the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives
how life can be lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet the
lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of the last canal builder
will return all the old slovenliness and disease, and the native will
sink back into just what he would have been had we never come.

I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very town at which I had
landed on the Zone five months before was being razed to give place to
the permanent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the canal
headquarters. Balboa police station was only a pile of lumber, with a
band of negroes drilling away the very rock on which it had stood. I
took a last view of the Pacific and her islands to far Taboga, where
Uncle Sam sends his recuperating children to enjoy the sea baths, hill
climbs, and unrivaled pine-apples. It was never my good fortune to get
to Taboga. With thirty days' sick leave a year and countless ailments
of which I might have been cured free of charge and with the best of
care, I could not catch a thing. I had not even the luck