The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1903-09-27

| ana the green vines nave clutchei thelr
clinging way to the proud roof itself
and hang in thick festoons over tire
| fine windows.
Does no one live here?" I asked tie
man that showed the old house to us.
He crossed himself.
mo one" he said, "but him whom
the Americans love to laugh at
Who is that?'' said I. Creeping
Johnny?"
The man nodded and crossed himself
again.
Did they all die, the fine gentlemen,
who came here to live in this fine
house?''
.All who did not go home in time
said the man.
DO you know what that house
7, stands on?"
1.-TWO hundred thousand dollars
worth of machinery" he replied.
Couldn't it be dug out and sold for
old iron?'
The man smiled Come with me-
he said; and we went with dim and
saw great cables, every link as big
around as big mans body, lying on
the fostering ground.
Touch it, said the man. Ny nm
brelIa went through the great ci:le
| links as if they had been made Of
nodded jelly.
We saw great, dead engines lying IN
the fetid heat and rotting as il tn"y
We're so much decayed vegetation. We
saw huge boilers red with rust and 50
soft that you could push a iatpin into
i the rotten iron. We saw the superin-
| tendent's house where one superin-
tendent after another had died within
an hour or two of fever and lelirium.
We saw the workmen's huts, crowded
| together in the matted vines. Empty,
all of them.
Forty died in that house" said the
man, who showed us. when one
died the next man took his place. Ir
| that house twenty men died. In tbs
one. thirty. All workmen. They kept
drunk all night every night to shut out
| the fear, but they died just the same
1t was gay time here when the Canal
was building. Every man spent every
day all the money that he had. Who
could tell who would spend il for him
tomorrow? The living drank 10 the
dead and the dying laughed at the
living. oh. life was very gay theLi
But they all died and were sent home,
some to France those were the SEN
tlemen. you Understandable some to
the States-they We're the Worllnler--
and it is very quiet in Panama now
We dared not stay long at the mouth
of the Canal to see how the vines were
choking it up. The Creeping Johnny
crawled before us there and we did not
want to meet him.
IAN American named him so-the
Creeping Johnny" said the man who
showed us the Canal, land after that
when the white mist began to crawl Up
out of the Canal the men said, Here
comes the Creeping Johnny. Who'll take
my last message home for me?'
The people of Panama do not want
the Canal. They do not like the re-
venge which the earth takes when it
is stirred out of its long sleep down
there. Perhaps modern system of
draining, a sweeping tearing-up of the
vines. a determined fight against the
strange trees which spring up in a
day and trail their sodden leaves on
the dank shadow they make in the wet
heat. would do something to make
Creeping Johnny" less powerful to
kill. Perhaps the Americans would
| succeed where the French failed; but
on the deck and watched the water
grow from purple to blue, and from
blue to muddy gray, and we forgot the
splendor of the stars and could not re-
member the glory of the smiling skies