Across the bridge was a telephone station and beyond and below it the great approaches to the locks along which electric locomotives will draw the ships that pass through. There was a subject, and I tackled it at once. In the distance the already filling lake--among islands, but the highland still above the water, dotting it, crowned with palms and strange trees; dredgers slowly moved, native canoes paddled rapidly, over all hovered great birds. To the right was the long line of the French Canal, almost submerged, stretching to the distance, against which, blue and misty and flat, were strange-shaped mountains, outlined with strange-shaped trees. Bridges like those of Hiroshigi connected island with island or with the mainland. It was perfect, the apotheosis of the Wonder of Work, and as I looked the whole rocked as with an earthquake--and then another. I was dragged into the hut as showers of stones rattled on the roof as blast after blast went off near by. Soon people in authority came up--I supposed to stop me; instead it was only to show pleasure that I found their work worth drawing. These men were all Americans, all so proud of their part in the Canal, and so strong and healthy--most of them trained and educated, I knew as soon as they opened their mouths--the greatest contrast to the crowd on the steamer, who now were all tamely following a guide and listening to what they could neither understand nor see during their only day ashore. These engineers and workmen are the sort of Americans worth knowing, and yet I did not see any golf links at Gatun. The day was spent in that telephone box and on the Spillway of the Dam--a semicircle of cyclopean concrete, backed by a bridge finer than Hokusai ever imagined, yet built to carry the huge engines that drag the long trains of dirt and rock across it, to make the dam. The dam, to me, was too big and too vague to draw. And all this is the work of my countrymen, and they are so proud of their work. Yet the men who have done this great work will tell you that we owe much to the French, and that if the engineers and the Commission at Panama had not the Government, with unlimited men and money, behind them, and the discoveries in sanitary science of which the French were ignorant, we, too, would have failed. They tell you, and show you how, the French worked on the Canal right across the Isthmus, and we are carrying out the great project they were unable to complete. And we have won the admiration of the world.