The new director of the canal company put a tug at our disposal, and sent us orders that permitted us to see as much of the canal as has been completed from the Pacific side. But before presenting our orders we drove out from the city one afternoon and began a personally conducted inspection of the machine-shops. We had read of the pathetic spectacle presented by thousands of dollars’ worth of locomotive engines and machinery lying rotting and rusting in the swamps, and as it had interested us when we had read of it, we were naturally even more anxious to see it with our own eyes. We, however, did not see any machinery rusting, nor any locomotives lying half buried in the mud. All the locomotives that we saw were raised from the ground on ties and protected with a wooden shed, and had been painted and oiled and cared for as they would have been in the Baldwin Locomotive Works. We found the same state of things in the great machine-works, and though none of us knew a turning-lathe from a sewing-machine, we could at least understand that certain wheels should make other wheels move if everything was in working order, and so we made the wheels go round, and punched holes in sheets of iron with steel rods, and pierced plates, and scraped iron bars, and climbed to shelves twenty and thirty feet from the floor, only to find that each bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was as sharp and covered as thick with oil as though it had been in use that morning. This was not as interesting as it would have been had we seen what the other writers who have visited the isthmus saw. And it would have given me a better chance for descriptive writing had I found the ruins of gigantic dredging-machines buried in the morasses, and millions of dollars’ worth of delicate machinery blistering and rusting under the palm-trees; but, as a rule, it is better to describe things just as you saw them, and not as it is the fashion to see them, even though your way be not so picturesque. As a matter of fact, the care the company was taking of its machinery and its fleet of dredging-scows and locomotives struck me as being much more pathetic than the sight of the same instruments would have been had we found them abandoned to the elements and the mud. For it was like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and polishing his buttons after his army had been routed and killed, and he had lost everything, including honor. [Illustration: HUTS OF WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL]