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.
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