I myself am inclined to cut the Gordian knot by proposing a new name. With a temperature of 90 to 100 degrees F. in the shade on Christmas and New Year’s days, the town should be called Infero in Esperanto, Inferno in Italian, Enfer in French, Hoelle in German, Lugar Endiablado in Spanish and Vamick in Volapuk. I suggested this explanation to our Englishman of the S. S. Limón as we were parting at the Panama railroad station, and he said, “Go to Panama.”
I chartered a ten-cent cab at the station and entered into conversation with the driver, who, with his vast fund of knowledge concerning Spanish words and Panama city geography, taught me many things. He was one of the few Panama cabmen who spoke English.
In order to give him some information in return, I told him that I came from one of the youngest and largest cities in the United States, a city in which we had a river whose water ran backward toward its source, that the city had also built a canal that carried the waters from Lake Michigan uphill on its way down to the Gulf of Mexico, and had constructed a pump that would have pumped the Niagara Falls into the Mississippi River had not the rest of the country objected and interfered. I told him that some of us remembered when Chicago was the center of the greatest Indian scalping district of the world.
He stared at me with the whites of his eyes while I was talking, and then wanted to know if I had ever seen any one scalped. I told him that I had myself been scalped five times and was now growing my sixth head of hair; that the hair of many of our women turned golden yellow instead of gray as they grew older; that hairgrowing was one of our industries, and our horticulturists made it grow on wax figures faster than it grows on babies’ heads, just as our builders put roofs on houses before building the walls, and in his hot country would leave off the walls altogether.
“Do they ever begin at the roof and build downward?” he asked, dryly.
“Not as a rule, but we often begin the new building before the old one is torn down, and put in the new foundation and supports while the old building is still inhabited.”
He did not seem to know that I was telling the truth, for he began to lose interest and whipped up his emaciated horse to keep it from falling down, and apart. So I changed the subject.
“Your horse seems to be getting very thin from your efforts. Or perhaps it is from its own efforts. It is tired carrying its age, which, of course, is growing greater and heavier every day. It ought to be wired and connected with a power-house. In my country we put up better frameworks and run them by gasoline vapor. How do you feed it?”
“I don’t feed him.”
“I beg pardon. I meant to ask how you diet him?”