from Barbados and Jamaica reported to their bosses, a few days before, as "hell hole" or hell gate. Many of the newspapers took it up, and a large section of the European Press was convinced, cablegraphically I suppose, that we had unearthed an awakening volcano in the very track of our four hundred million dollar waterway. Indeed, I do not blame the European brethren if they reported what they actually saw. I myself have seen half a dozen volcanoes in Java (lady's volcanoes the Dutch call them, from their gentle ways and the fact that they can easily be visited by the most Chinese-footed of the fair sex), which did not look so volcanic to the untutored and unscientific eye. At all events on this day all the ground about was either aflame or a smoking, and, here and there, the earth had been burnt into heaps of rubbish, which had taken on strange fantastic colours. Whatever it may be, and I personally had not the ghost of a notion, this is not ordinary pay-dirt. But already men, keen-eyed deep-delving geologists from whom Mother Earth cannot conceal her secrets, have brushed away the superstition of the negroes and the theories of the half-baked scientists. It is not the gate to hell and it is not a destruction breeding volcano we are face to face with, but an interesting phenomenon, which wise men from all over the world are hastening to see. I confess that the feature of it that I find most interesting, is that the phenomenon has proved helpful rather than hurtful to the work of excavation.

It happened in this wise, say the geologists. A steam shovel or a blast, destroying better than it knew, brought to view and exposed to the burning rays of

the overhead tropical sun, a great deposit of iron pyrites. A slow fire by combustion or from the blast was the result, to which a nearby lying bed of free lime contributed further fuel; to-day the fire smoulders in a bed of lignite and as nothing is easier to remove than ashes, strict orders have been given to watch the fire, but by no means to put it out; already many hundred yards of what would have been, but for this happy accident and the glowing kiss of the sun, stubborn spoils, have been incinerated and this cross-section of burnt-out earth displays more dissolving colours than ever did Joseph's coat. Only steam-shovel man No. 5011 is disappointed, for when the "volcano" was first reported he offered Colonel Goethals to dig it out "by the roots" with his great machine.

One hundred yards further on another phenomenon is staged. It is not visible, however, to the naked eye unless the eye has the insight of imagination, but it is none the less real and none the less formidable for all that. We have reached the bottom of the chasm as it yawns to-day. Here the eighty-five-foot level, the future level of the canal, has been reached and indeed surpassed, the extra depth being needed, it is said, for a temporary or emergency drainage canal. And perhaps here the hole has been dug deep as an object lesson of what is yet to come all along the line. In other words, it is a reconnaissance in force to the bottom of the "cut." Here even the most thoughtless and unscientific toiler can get the measure of the work that still awaits us and gird up his loins for the mighty sustained efforts that will yet be required of him.

The truth and the correctness of the level reached in this place was ascertained by the most scientific instruments and substantially corroborated by half a dozen others, including the rule of thumb for which most foremen of working gangs have such a strong partiality. But a day or two later the place did not look right. Some with the insight of imagination in their vision said the ground had risen over night and boldly asserted that they saw it rise while they stood there! When the measuring instruments were brought science confirmed the imaginative point of view. The bottom of the canal channel had risen a foot in fortyeight hours, and worse luck! was still rising! A feeling of superstitious awe now possessed some of the men of this particular working gang. Here was indeed no end of a job! Here was an endless chain of excavations! A prey to superstitious fears and powerless to continue on the job, some of the Spaniards here engaged here where they had made an enviable record for endurance and steadiness, second to no men whether white or black-had to be transferred to less fantastic fields of labour and the matter-of-fact steam-shovel men were called in by the equally unemotional engineers. The ditch was dug out again "deep and plenty," as the steam-shovellers say, and again it filled out and welled up to its former level.

Then the wise men, responsible for the construction of the world's eighth wonder, put on their thinking caps and found a very natural, if regrettable, explanation of the extraordinary occurrence. The rise of the soil in the "cut," and indeed in the bottom of the future waterway in many other places, was caused by the weight of the banks which remained and the lateral