the morning paper announces that the Chagres River has risen forty feet in two days and is still rising. The rainfall is much heavier on the Atlantic side than the Pacific. They have a saying at Colon that there are two seasons on the Isthmus, the wet and the rainy; and the people of that town used to boast that it rained there every day in the year. But their local pride had a sad fall at the end of the record dry season of 1912. At Colon, as well as elsewhere, it had not rained for months, wide cracks had opened in the hard, dry ground, and the whole country-side was as brown and ragged as an old cigar. When at last "the rains broke" at Ancon, over on the Pacific side, in a magnificent cloudburst—six solid inches of water in three hours—they were still carrying drinking-water to Colon in barges, and had to borrow Ancon's new motor fire-engine to pump it through the mains.
When the rains have come, it is a wonderful sight to see how quickly the old, half-dead vegetation disappears, and the new green stuff comes rushing up. Though the soil is not rich, the heat and moisture cause plants to grow with incredible speed and rankness. Fence-posts sprout and become young trees. The stone-ballasted roadbed of the Panama Railroad has to be sprayed twice a month with crude oil to keep down the weeds. On either side of the track for the greater part of the way across the Isthmus stretches unbroken jungle, rising like a wall at the edge of the cuttings, or lying like a great, green sea below the embankments. It is a thoroughly satisfactory jungle, every bit as good as the pictures in the school geographies. High above the rest tower the tall ceiba trees, great soft woods larger than the largest
