A dinner was given M. Henri Boinne, secretary-general of the company. Some one remarked that there were thirteen at the table, whereupon the guest of honor remarked gaily that as he was the last to come he would have to pay for all. In two weeks he was dead--yellow fever. Others at the dinner followed him. Of the members of one surveying party on the upper waters of the Chagres--a region I myself visited without a suggestion of ill effects--every one, twenty-two in all, were prostrated by disease and ten died. Bunau-Varilla, whose name is closely linked with the canal, says: “Out of every one hundred individuals arriving on the Isthmus, I can say without exaggeration that only twenty have been able to remain at their posts at the working stations, and even in that number many who were able to present an appearance of health had lost much of their courage.” Col. Gorgas tells of a party of eighteen young Frenchmen who came to the Isthmus, all but one of whom died within a month. The Mother Superior of the nursing sisters in the French hospital at Ancon lost by fever twenty-one out of twenty-four sisters who had accompanied her to the Isthmus. How great was the total loss of French lives can only be guessed. The hospital records show that at Ancon, 1041 patients died of yellow fever. Col. Gorgas figures that as many died outside the hospital. All the French records are more or less incomplete and their authenticity doubtful because apprehension for the tender hopes and fears of the shareholders led to the suppression of unpleasant facts. The customary guess is that two out of every three Frenchmen who went to the Isthmus died there. Col. Gorgas, who at one time figures the total loss during the French régime at 16,500, recently raised his estimate to 22,000, these figures of course including negro workmen. Little or no effort was made to induce sanitary living, as under the Americans, and so ignorant were the French--as indeed all physicians were at that time--of the causes of the spread of yellow fever, that they set the legs of the hospital beds in shallow pans of water to keep the ants from creeping to the beds. The ants were stopped, but the water bred hosts of wrigglers from which came the deadly _stegomyia_ mosquito, which carries the yellow-fever poison from the patient to the well person. Had the hospital been designed to spread instead of to cure disease its managers could not have planned better. [Illustration: NEGRO QUARTERS, FRENCH TOWN OF EMPIRE Paving and sanitary arrangements due to American régime] It is a curious fact that, in a situation in which the toll of death is heaviest, man is apt to be most reckless and riotous in his pleasures. The old drinking song of the English guardsmen beleaguered during the Indian mutiny voices the almost universal desire of strong men to flaunt a gay defiance in the face of death: