It is no wonder that we have trains to dodge during the course of our stroll. There are at the moment of our visit 115 locomotives and 2000 cars in service in the Cut. About 160 loaded trains go out daily, and, of course about 160 return empty. Three hundred and twenty trains in the eight-hour day, with two hours’ intermission at noon, means almost one train a minute speeding through a right of way 300 feet wide and much cluttered up with shovels, drills and other machinery. In March, 1911, the record month, these trains handled 1,728,748 cubic yards of material, carrying all to the dumps which average 12 miles distant, the farthest one being 33 miles. The lay mind does not at first think of it, but it is a fact that it was no easy task to select spots for all this refuse in a territory only 436 square miles in area, of which 164 square miles is covered by Gatun Lake and much of the rest is higher than the Cut and therefore unsuited for dumps. The amount of material disposed of would create new land worth untold millions could it have been dumped along the lake front of Chicago, or in the Hackensack meadows near New York.

To load these busy trains there were in the Cut in its busiest days 43 steam shovels mainly of the type that would take five cubic yards of material at a bite. One load for each of these shovels weighed 8.7 tons of rock, 6.7 tons of earth, or 8.03 tons of the “run of the Cut”—the mixed candy of the Culebra shop. March 11, 1911, was the record day for work on the Central Division of which the Cut is the largest component part. That day 333 loaded trains were run out and as many in, and 51 steam shovels and 2 cranes with orange peel buckets excavated 127,742 tons of material. It was no day for nervous tourists to go sightseeing in the Cut.

Let us watch one of the steam shovels at work. You will notice first that it requires two railroad tracks for its operation—the one on which it stands and one by the side on which are the flat cars it is to load. If the material in which it is to work is clay or sand, the shovel track is run close to the side of the hill to be cut away; otherwise the blasters will have preceded it and a great pile of broken rock lies by the side of the track or covering it before the shovel. Perched on a seat which revolves with the swinging arm a man guides the great steel jaws to the point of excavation. A tug at one lever and the jaws begin to bite into the clay, or root around in the rock pile until the toothed scoops have filled the great shovel that, closed, is rather bigger than a boarding house hall bedroom. A tug at another lever and they close. A third lever causes the arm to swing until it comes to a stop above the flat car, then with a roar and a clatter the whole load is dumped. Perhaps then the trouble is just beginning. Once in a while a boulder of irregular shape rolls about threatening to fall to the ground. With almost human intelligence the great rigid arm of the shovel follows it, checking it as it approaches the edge of the car, pushing it back, buttressing it with other stones, so that when the train gets under way it may by no chance fall off. Sometimes you see all this done from a point at which the directing man is invisible and the effect is uncanny.

Travelers in Burmah are fond of telling how the trained elephants pile teak lumber, pushing with tusk and pulling with trunk until the beams lie level and parallel to an inch. But marvelous as is the delicacy with which the unwieldy animals perform their work, it is outdone by the miraculous ingenuity with which the inventive mind of man has adapted these monsters of steel to their appointed task. We shall see on the Zone many mechanical marvels, but to my mind the sight of a man, seated placidly in a comfortable chair, and with a touch on levers making a twenty foot steel arm, with a pair of scoops each as big as a hogshead at the end, feel up and down a bit of land until it comes upon a boulder weighing five tons, then pick it up, deposit it on a flat car, and block it around with smaller stones to hold it firm—this spectacle I think will rank with any as an illustration of mechanical genius. It is a pity old Archimedes, who professed himself able to move the world with a lever if he could only find a place for his fulcrum, could not sit a while in the chair of an Isthmian steam shoveler. These men earn from $210 to $240 a month and are the aristocracy of the mechanical force in a society where everybody is frankly graded according to his earnings. They say their work is exceedingly hard upon the nerves, a statement which I can readily credit after watching them at it. Once in a great while they deposit the six-ton load of a shovel on top of some laborer’s head. Incidents of this sort are wearing on their nerves and also upon the physique of the individual upon whom the burden has been laid. On several occasions I timed steam shovels working in the Cut on various sorts of material and found the period occupied in getting a load, depositing it on the car and getting back into position for another bite to be a fraction less than two minutes. According to my observations from five to eight shovel loads filled a car. The car once filled, a big negro wig-wagged the tidings to the engineer who pulled the train ahead the length of one car. The Jamaica negro wig-wagging is always a pleasing spectacle. He seems to enjoy a job as flagman which gives from five to fifteen minutes of calm reflection to each one minute of wagging. Far be it from me to question the industry of these sable Britons by whom the Canal is being built. Their worth in any place, except that of waiters at the Tivoli Hotel, must be conceded. But their specialty is undoubtedly wig-wagging.

If we climb upon one of the empty flat cars we will see that upon the floor of the whole train, usually made up of about 20 cars, is stretched a stout cable attached to a heavy iron wedge like a snow plow which, while the train is loading, is on the end car. Hinged sheets of steel fall into place between the cars, making the train floor continuous from end to end. If we should accompany the train to the dump—say at the great fill at Balboa about twelve miles from the Cut—we shall find that when it has reached its assigned position a curious looking car on which is an engine which revolves a huge drum, or bull wheel, is attached in place of the locomotive. The end of the steel cable buried under hundreds of tons of rock and dirt is fastened to the bull wheel, the latter begins to revolve and the steel plow begins to travel along the train thrusting the load off to one side. One side of the flat cars is built up and the plow is so constructed that the load is thrown to the other side only. It takes from 7 to 15 minutes to unload a train by this device which is known as the Lidgerwood Unloader.

Now it is apparent that after a certain number of trains have thus been unloaded the side of the track on which the load falls, unless it be a very deep ravine, will presently be so filled up that no more loads can be dumped there. To smooth out this mound of dirt along the track another type of snow plow is used, one stretching out a rigid steel arm ten or twelve feet from the side of the locomotive which pushes it into the mass of débris. This is called a spreader and as may well be imagined requires prodigious power. The dump heap thus spread, and somewhat leveled by hand labor, becomes a base for another track.

In the early days of the work this business of shifting tracks required the services of hundreds of men. But it grew so steadily under the needs of the service—they say the Panama Railway runs sideways as well as lengthwise—that the mechanical genius of American engineers was called into play to meet the situation. Wherefore behold the track-shifter, an engine operating a long crane which picks up the track, ties, rails and all, and swings it to one side three feet or more according to the elasticity of the track. It takes nine men to operate a track shifter, and it does the work which took 500 men pursuing the old method of pulling spikes, shifting ties and rails separately and spiking the rails down again. It is estimated that by this device the government was saved several million dollars, to say nothing of an enormous amount of time. While the Panama Railroad is only 47 miles long it has laid almost 450 miles of rails, and these are continually being taken up and shifted, particularly those laid on the bed of the Canal in Culebra Cut. It is perfectly clear that to keep the steam shovels within reaching distance of the walls they are to dig away, the track on which they operate and the track on which their attendant dirt trains run must be shifted laterally every two or three days.

Looking up from the floor of the Canal one had in those days of rushing construction a prospect at once gigantic, brilliant and awe inspiring. Between Gold Hill and Contractors Hill the space open to the sky is half a mile wide and the two peaks tower toward the sky 534 feet to the one side and 410 on the other. We see again dimly through the smoke of the struggling locomotives and the fumes of exploding dynamite the prismatic color of the stripped sides of the hill, though on the higher altitudes untouched by recent work and unscarred by slides the tropical green has already covered all traces of man’s mutilations. In time, of course, all this coloring will disappear and the ships will steam along betwixt two towering walls of living green.

One’s attention, however, when in the Cut is held mainly by its industrial rather than by its scenic features. For the latter the view from above, already described, is incalculably the better. But down here in the depths your mind is gripped by the signs of human activity on every side. Everything that a machine can do is being done by machinery, yet there are 6000 men working in this narrow way, men white and black and of every intermediate and indeterminate shade. Men who talk in Spanish, French, the gibberish of the Jamaican, in Hindoo, in Chinese. One thinks it a pity that Col. Goethals and his chief lieutenants could not have been at the Tower of Babel, for in that event that aspiring enterprise would never have been halted by so commonplace an obstacle as the confusion of tongues.

To us as we plod along all seems to be conducted with terrific energy, but without any recognizable plan. As a matter of fact all is being directed in accordance with an iron-clad system. That train, the last cars of which are being loaded, on the second level must be out of the Cut and on the main line at a fixed hour or there will be a tie-up of the empties coming back from the distant dumps. That row of holes must be drilled by five o’clock, for the blast must be fired as soon as the Cut is emptied of workers. The very tourists on the observation car going through the Cut must be chary of their questions, for that track is needed now for a train of material. If they are puzzled by something they see, it will all be explained to them later by the guide in his lecture illustrated by the working model at the Tivoli Hotel.

So trudging through the Cut we pass under a slender foot bridge suspended across the Canal from towers of steel framework. The bridge was erected by the French and will have to come down when the procession of ships begins the passage of the Canal. Originally its towers were of wood, but a man idly ascending one thought it sounded hollow beneath his tread and, on examination, found the interior had been hollowed out by termite ants leaving a mere shell which might give way under any unaccustomed strain. This is a pleasant habit of these insects and sometimes produces rather ludicrous results when a heavy individual encounters a chair that has engaged their attention.

The activity and industry of the ant are of course proverbial in every clime, but it seems to me that in the Isthmus particularly he appears to put the sluggard to shame. As you make your way through the jungle you will now and again come upon miniature roads, only about four inches wide it is true, but vastly smoother and better cleaned of vegetation than the paths which the Panamanians dignify with the name of roads. Along these highways trudges an endless army of ants, those going homeward bearing burdens of leaves which, when buried in their subterranean homes, produce fungi on which the insects live. Out on the savanna you will occasionally find a curious mound of hard dirt, sometimes standing taller than a man and rising abruptly from the plain. It is an ant’s nest built about a shrub or small tree, which usually dies off so that no branches protrude in any direction. A large one represents long years of the work of the tiny insects. Col. Goethals has made a great working machine of the Canal organization but he can teach the ants nothing so far as patient and continuous industry is concerned.

We come in due time to the upper entrance of the Pedro Miguel lock. Here the precipitous sides of the Canal have vanished, and the walls of the lock have in fact to be built up above the adjacent land. This is the end of the Central Division—the end of the Culebra Cut. The 8.8 miles we have left behind us have been the scene, perhaps, of the most wonderful exercise of human ingenuity, skill and determination ever manifested in any equal space in the world—and I won’t even except Wall Street, where ingenuity and skill in cutting things down are matter of daily observation. But nowhere else has man locked with nature in so desperate a combat. More spectacular engineering is perhaps to be seen on some of the railroads through our own Sierras or on the trans-Andean lines. Such dams as the Roosevelt or the Shoshone of our irrigation service are more impressive than the squat, immovable ridge at Gatun. But the engineers who planned the campaign against the Cordilleras at Culebra had to meet and overcome more novel obstacles, had to wrestle with a problem more appalling in magnitude than any that ever confronted men of their profession in any other land or time.

As no link in a chain is of less importance than any other link, so the Pacific Division of the Panama Canal is of equal importance with the other two. It has not, however, equally spectacular features. Its locks at Pedro Miguel and at Miraflores are merely replicas of the Gatun locks with different drops, and separated into one step of two parallel locks at the former point, and two steps, with four locks in pairs at Miraflores. Between the two locks is an artificial lake about 54²⁄₃ feet above sea level and about a mile and a half long. The lake is artificial, supplied partly by small rivers that flow into it and partly by the water that comes down from the operation of the locks above. In fact it was created largely for the purpose of taking care of this water, though it also served to reduce somewhat the amount of dry excavation on the Canal. One advantage which both the Gatun and Miraflores lakes have for the sailor, that does not at first occur to the landsman, is that being filled with fresh water, as also is the main body of the Canal, they will cleanse the bottoms of the ships passing through of barnacles and other marine growths. This is a notable benefit to ships engaged in tropical trade, for in those latitudes their bottoms become befouled in a way that seriously interferes with their steaming capacity.

The name Pedro Miguel is given to this lock because the French began operations there on the feast day of St. Peter Michael, whose name in Spanish is applied to the spot. An omniscient gentleman on the train once assured me that the name came from a Spanish hermit who long lived on the spot in the odor of sanctity—and divers other odors if the haunts of the hermits I have visited elsewhere were any criterion.

Errors of fact, however, are common on the zone. They still laugh about a congressman who, on Gatun dam, struck an attitude and exclaimed with feeling—“At last then I stand in the far-famed Culebra Cut”! which spot was a trifle more than thirty miles away.

From the lower lock at Miraflores the canal describes a practically straight course to the Pacific Ocean at Balboa, about 4¹⁄₂ miles. The channel is continued out to sea about four miles further. All the conditions of the Pacific and Oriental trade give assurance that at Balboa will grow the greatest of all purely tropical ports. To it the commerce of the whole Pacific coast of North America, and of South America as far south at least as Lima, will irresistibly flow. To it will also come the trade of Japan, Northern China and the Philippines, seeking the shortest route to Europe or to our own Atlantic coast. It is true that much of this trade will pass by, but the ships will enter the Canal after long voyages in need of coal and in many cases of refitting. The government has anticipated this need by providing for a monster dry dock, able to accommodate the 1000 foot ships yet to be built, and establishing repair shops fit to build ships as well as to repair them. In 1913, however, when this trip through the Canal under construction was made, little sign of this coming greatness was apparent. The old dock of the Pacific Mail and a terminal pier of the Panama Railroad afforded sufficient dockage for the steamships of which eight or ten a week cleared or arrived. The chief signs of the grandeur yet to come were the never-ceasing dirt trains rumbling down from Culebra Cut and discharging their loads into the sea in a great fan shaped “fill” that will afford building sites for all the edifices of the future Balboa, however great it may become. Looking oceanward you see the three conical islands on which the United States is already erecting its fortifications.

Here then the Canal ends. Begun in the ooze of Colon it is finished in the basaltic rock of Balboa. To carry it through its fifty miles the greatest forces of nature have been utilized when possible; fought and overcome when not. It has enlisted genius, devotion and sacrifice, and has inflicted sickness, wounds and death. We can figure the work in millions of dollars, or of cubic yards, but to estimate the cost in life and health from the time the French began until the day the Americans ended is a task for the future historian, not the present-day chronicler.

CHAPTER XIII
THE CITY OF PANAMA.

For an American not too much spoiled with foreign travel the city of Panama is a most entertaining stopping place for a week or more. In what its charm consists it is hard to say. Foreign it is, of course, a complete change from anything within the borders, or for that matter close to the bounds of the United States. But it is not so thorough a specimen of Latin-American city building as Cartagena, its neighbor. Its architecture is admittedly commonplace, the Cathedral itself being interesting mainly because of its antiquity—and it would be modern in old Spain. The Latin gaiety of its people breaks out in merry riot at carnival time, but it is equally riotous in every town of Central America. Withal there is a something about Panama that has an abiding novelty. Perhaps it is the tang of the tropics added to the flavor of antiquity. Anyhow the tourist who abides in the intensely modern and purely United States hotel, the Tivoli, has but to give a dime to a Panama hackman to be transported into an atmosphere as foreign as though he had suddenly been wafted to Madrid.

Latter-day tourists complain that the sanitary efforts of the Isthmian Commission have robbed Panama of something of its picturesqueness. They deplore the loss of the streets that were too sticky for the passage of Venetian gondolas, but entirely too liquid for ordinary means of locomotion. They grieve over the disappearance of the public roulette wheels and the monotonous cry of the numbers at keno. They complain that the population has taken to the practice of wearing an inordinate quantity of clothes instead of being content with barely enough to pique curiosity concerning the few charms concealed. But though the city has been remarkably purified there is still enough of physical dirt apparent to displease the most fastidious, and quite sufficient moral uncleanliness if one seeks for it, as in other towns.

The entrance by railway to Panama is not prepossessing, but for that matter I know of few cities in which it is. Rome and Genoa perhaps excel in offering a fine front to the visitor. But in Panama when you emerge from the station after a journey clear across the continent, which has taken you about three hours, you are confronted by a sort of ragged triangular plaza. In the distance on a hill to your right is set the Tivoli Hotel looking cool and inviting with its broad piazzas and dress of green and white. To your left is a new native hotel, the International, as different from the Tivoli as imaginable, built of rubble masonry covered with concrete stucco, with rooms twice as high as those of the usual American building. It looks cool too, in a way, and its most striking feature is a pleasingly commodious bar, with wide open unscreened doors on the level of the sidewalk. The Tivoli Hotel, being owned and managed by the United States government, has no bar. This statement is made in no spirit of invidious comparison, but merely as a matter of helpful information to the arriving traveler undecided which hotel to choose.

The plaza is filled with Panama cabs—small open victorias, drawn by stunted wiry horses like our cow ponies and driven by Panama negroes who either do not speak English, or, in many cases, pretend not to in order to save themselves the trouble of explaining any of the sights to their fares. There is none of the bustle that attends the arrival of a train in an American city. No raucous cries of “Keb, sir? Keb”! no ingratiating eagerness to seize upon your baggage, no ready proffer of willingness to take you anywhere. If the Panama cabby shows any interest at all in getting a fare out of an arriving crowd it seems to be in evading the one who beckons him, and trying to capture someone else. One reason perhaps for the lethargy of these sable jehus is that the government has robbed their calling of its sporting feature by fixing their fare at ten cents to any place in town. Opportunity to rob a fare is almost wholly denied them, hence their dejected air as compared with the alert piratical demeanor of the buccaneers who kidnap passengers at the railway stations of our own enlightened land. The only way the Panama driver can get the best of the passenger is by construing each stop as the end of a trip, and the order to drive on as constituting a new engagement involving an additional dime. Tourists who jovially drew up to the curbstone to greet acquaintances met en route several times in a half-hour’s ride are said to have been mulcted of a surprising number of dimes, but in justice to the Panama hackman—who really doesn’t have the air of rioting in ill-gotten wealth—I must say that I never encountered an instance of this overcharge.

Your first introduction to the beauty of Panama architecture comes from a building that fronts you as you leave your train. Three stories high it has the massive strength of a confectioner’s creations, and is tastefully colored a sickly green, relieved by stripes of salmon pink, with occasional interludes of garnet and old gold. The fact that it houses a saloon, the proportions of which would be generous on the Bowery or South Clark Street, does not explain this brilliant color scheme. It is merely the expression of the local color sense, and is quite likely to be employed to lend distinction to a convent school or a fashionable club indiscriminately.

From the Railway Plaza—originality has not yet furnished a more attractive name—the Avenida Centrale stretches away in a generally southerly direction to the seawall at the city’s end. What Broadway is to New York, the Corso to Rome, or Main Street to Podunk, this street is to Panama. It is narrow and in time will be exceedingly crowded, for the rails of a trolley line are laid on one side, and some time in the leisurely Panamanian future the cars will run through the old town and so on out to Balboa where the Americans are building the great docks at the entrance to the Canal. Just now however it is chiefly crowded with the light open carriages which toward eventide carry up and down the thoroughfare olive-complexioned gentlemen who look smilingly at the balconies on either side whence fair ones—of varying degrees of fairness with a tendency toward the rich shade of mahogany—look down approvingly.

Panama is an old city, as American cities run, for it was founded in 1673 when the Bishop marked with a cross the place for the Cathedral. The Bishop still plays a notable part in the life of the town, for it is to his palace in Cathedral Plaza that you repair Sunday mornings to hear the lucky number in the lottery announced. This curious partnership between the church and the great gambling game does not seem to shock or even perplex the Panamanians, and as the State turns over to the church a very considerable percentage of the lottery’s profits it is perhaps only fair for the Bishop to be thus hospitable. If you jeer a well-informed Panamanian on the relations of his church to the lottery he counters by asking suavely about the filthy tenement houses owned by Old Trinity in New York. As a vested right under the Colombian government the lottery will continue until 1918, then expire under the clause in the Panama constitution which prohibits gambling. Drawings are held each Sunday. Ten thousand tickets are issued at a price of $2.50 each, though the custom is to buy one-fifth of a ticket at a time. The capital prize is $7500 with lesser prizes of various sums down to one dollar. The Americans on the Zone buy eagerly, but I could not learn of any one who had captured a considerable prize. One official who systematically set aside $5 a week for tickets told me that, after four years’ playing, he was several hundred dollars ahead “beside the fun”.

Though old historically, Panama is modern architecturally. It was repeatedly swept by fires even before the era of overfumigation by the Canal builders. Five fires considerable enough to be called “great” are recorded. Most of the churches have been burned at least once and the façade of the Cathedral was overthrown by an earthquake. The San Domingo Church, the Church and Convent of San Francisco, and the Jesuit Church still stand in ruins. In Italy or England these ruins would be cared for, clothed by pious, or perhaps practical, hands with a certain sort of dignity. Not so in Panama. The San Domingo Church, much visited by tourists because of its curious flat arch, long housed a cobbler’s bench and a booth for curios. Now its owner is utilizing such portions of the ruin as are still stable as part of a tenement house he is building. When reproached for thus obliterating an historic relic he blandly offered to leave it in its former state, provided he were paid a rental equal to that the tenement would bring in. There being no society for the preservation of historic places in Panama his offer went unheeded, and the church is fast being built into the walls of a flat-house. As for the Church of the Jesuits its floor is gone, and cows and horses are stabled in the sanctuary of its apse.

The streets of Panama look older than they really are. The more substantial buildings are of rubble masonry faced with cement which quickly takes on an appearance of age. Avenida Centrale is lined for all but a quarter of a mile of its length with shops, over which as a rule the merchant’s family lives—for the Panamanians, like other Latins, have not yet acquired the New York idea that it is vulgar to live over your own place of business but perfectly proper to live two miles or more away over someone else’s drug store, grocery, stationery store, or what not. There might be an essay written on the precise sort of a business place above which it is correct for an American to live. Of course the nature of the entrance counts, and much propriety is saved if it be on the side front thus genteelly concealing from guests that there are any shops in the building at all. These considerations however are not important in Panama, and many of the best apartments are reached through dismal doors and up winding stairways which seldom show signs of any squeamishness on the part of the domestics, or intrusive activity by the sanitary officers.

Often, however, the apartments reached by such uninviting gateways are charming. The rooms are always big, equivalent each to about three rooms of our typical city flat. Great French windows open to the floor, and give upon broad verandas, from which the life of the street below may be observed—incidentally letting in the street noises which are many and varied. The tendency is to the minimum of furniture, and that light, so as to admit easy shifting to the breeziest spots. To our northern eyes the adjective “bare” would generally apply to these homes, but their furnishings are adapted to the climate and to the habits of people living largely out of doors. Rents are high for a town of 35,000 people. A five-room flat in a fairly good neighborhood will rent for from $60 to $75 gold a month, and as the construction is of the simplest and the landlord furnishes neither heat nor janitor service, it seems a heavy return on the capital invested.

It seemed to me, as the result of questioning and observation rather than by any personal experience, that living expenses in Panama City must be high, and good living according to our North American ideas impossible. What the visitor finds in the homes of the people on the Canal Zone offers no guide to the conditions existing in the native town. For the Zone dwellers have the commissary to buy from, and that draws from all the markets of the world, and is particularly efficient in buying meats, which it gets from our own Beef Trust and sells for about half of what the market man in Chicago or New York exacts. But the native Panamanian has no such source of supply. His meats are mainly native animals fresh killed, and if you have a taste for sanguinary sights you may see at early dawn every morning numbers of cattle and hogs slaughtered in a trim and cleanly open air abattoir which the Panamanians owe to the Canal authorities. However the climate tends to encourage a fish and vegetable diet, and the supplies of these staples are fairly good. The family buying is done at a central market which it is well worth the tourists’ time to visit.

Every day is market day at Panama, but the crowded little open-air mart is seen at its best of a Saturday or Sunday in the early morning. All night long the native boats, mostly cayucas hewn out of a single log and often as much as 35 feet long, and with a schooner rig, have been drifting in, propelled by the never-failing trade wind. They come from the Bayano River country, from Chorrera, from Taboga and the Isles of Pearls, from the Bay of San Miguel and from the land of the San Blas Indians. Great sailors these latter, veritable vikings of the tropics, driving their cayucas through shrieking gales when the ocean steamers find it prudent to stay in port.

Nature helps the primitive people of the jungle to bring their goods to the waiting purchasers. The breeze is constant, seldom growing to a gale, and the tide rising full 20 feet enables them to run their boats at high tide close to the market causeway, and when the tide retires land their products over the flats without the trouble of lighterage. True the bottom is of mud and stones, but the soles of the seamen are not tender, nor are they squeamish as to the nature of the soil on which they tread.

The market is open at dawn, and the buyers are there almost as soon as the sellers, for early rising is the rule in the tropics. Along the sidewalks, on the curbs, in the muddy roadway even, the diverse fruits and food products of the country are spread forth to tempt the robust appetites of those gathered about. Here is an Indian woman, the color of a cocoanut, and crinkled as to skin like a piece of Chinese crepe. Before her is spread out her stock, diverse and in some items curious. Green peppers, tomatoes a little larger than a small plum, a cheese made of goat’s milk and packed to about the consistency of Brie; a few yams, peas, limes and a papaya or two are the more familiar edibles. Something shaped like a banana and wrapped in corn husks arouses my curiosity.

“What is it”? “Five cents”. “No, no! I mean what is it? What’s it made of”? “Fi centavo”!

In despair over my lack of Indo-Spanish patois, I buy it and find a little native sugar, very moist and very dark, made up like a sausage, or a tamale in corn husks. Other mysterious objects turn out to be ginseng, which appeals to the resident Chinese; the mamei, a curious pulpy fruit the size of a large peach, with a skin like chamois and a fleshly looking pit about the size of a peach-stone; the sapodilla, a plum colored fruit with a mushy interior, which when cut transversely shows a star-like marking and is sometimes called the star apple. It is eaten with a spoon and is palatable. The mamei, however, like the mango, requires a specially trained taste.

While puzzling over the native fruits a sudden clamor attracts us to a different part of the market. There drama is in full enactment. The market place is at the edge of the bay and up the water steps three exultant fishermen have dragged a tuna about five feet long, weighing perhaps 175 pounds. It is not a particularly large fish of the species, but its captors are highly exultant and one, with the inborn instinct of the Latin-American to insult a captive or a fallen foe, stands on the poor tuna’s head and strikes an attitude as one who invites admiration and applause. Perhaps our camera tempted him, but our inclination was to kick the brute, rather than to perpetuate his pose, for the poor fish was still living. It had been caught in a net, so its captors informed us. On our own Florida and California coasts the tunas give rare sport with a rod and line.

Like most people of a low order of intelligence the lower class native of Panama is without the slightest sense of humanity to dumb animals. He does not seem to be intentionally cruel—indeed he is too indolent to exert himself unless something is to be gained. But he never lets any consideration for the sufferings of an animal affect his method of treating it. The iguana, ugliest of lizards, which he eats with avidity, is one of his chief victims. This animal is usually taken alive by hunters in order that he may undergo a preliminary fattening process before being committed to the pot. In captivity his condition is not pleasant to contemplate. Here at the market are eight or ten, living, palpitating, looking out on the strange world with eyes of wistful misery. Their short legs are roughly twisted so as to cross above their backs, and the sharp claws on one foot are thrust through the fleshy part of the other so as to hold them together without other fastening. A five-foot iguana is fully three feet tail, and of that caudal yard at least two feet of its tapering length is useless for food, so the native calmly chops it off with his machete, exposing the mutilated but living animal for sale.

To our northern eyes there is probably no animal except a serpent more repulsive than the iguana. He is not only a lizard, but a peculiarly hideous one—horned, spined, mottled and warty like a toad. But loathsome as he is, the wanton, thoughtless tortures inflicted upon him by the marketmen invest him with the pathetic dignity which martyrs bear.

Fish is apparently the great staple of the Panama market, as beseems a place which is practically an island and the very name of which signifies “many fishes”. Yet at the time I was there the variety exposed for sale was not great. The corbina, apparently about as staple and certain a crop as our northern cod, the red snapper, mullet and a flat fish resembling our fresh water sunfish, were all that were exhibited. There were a few West Indian lobsters too, about as large as our average sized lobsters, but without claws, having antennae, perhaps 18 inches long, instead. Shrimps and small molluscs were plentifully displayed. As to meats the market was neither varied nor pleasing. If the assiduous attentions of flies produce any effect on raw meats prejudicial to human health, the Panama market offers rich field for some extension of the sanitary powers of Col. Gorgas.

In one notable respect this Panama market differs from most open air affairs of the sort. The vendors make no personal effort to sell their goods. There is no appeal to passing buyers, no crying of wares, no “ballyhoo,” to employ the language of Coney Island. What chatter there is is chiefly among the buyers; the sellers sit silent by their wares and are more apt to receive a prospective customer sulkily than with alert eagerness. Indeed the prevalent condition of the Panamanian, so far as observable on the streets, seems to be a chronic case of sulks. Doubtless amongst his own kind he can be a merry dog, but in the presence of the despised “gringo” his demeanor is one of apathy, or contemptuous indifference. Perhaps what he was doing to the tuna and the iguana the day of our visit to the market was only what he would like to be doing to the northern invaders of his nondescript market place.

If you view the subject fairly the Panamanian in the street is somewhat entitled to his view of the American invasion. Why should he be particularly pleased over the independence of Panama and the digging of the Canal? He got none of the ten million dollars, or of the $250,000 annual payment. That went to his superiors who planned the “revolution” and told him about it when it was all over. The influx of Americans brought him no particular prosperity, unless he drove a hack. They lived in Commission houses and bought all their goods in their own commissary. It was true they cleaned up his town, but he was used to the dirt and the fumes of fumigation made him sneeze. Doubtless there was no more yellow fever, but he was immune to that anyway.