Not to be eloquent when silence would suffice.
Not to care when it couldn’t help.
Not to know everything.
Not to want anything.
Not to make any new resolutions until the old ones were worn out or broken.
Finally at half past three I arose, shut and locked the door, drank a bottle of imported lukewarm water, cooled myself by washing my chest and body with so-called cold water, and felt more or less refreshed.
After I had been down-stairs a few minutes, Doctor Echeverría and, later, Señor Arango appeared, and we started for the cable office to send a message to the doctor’s wife and enquire after the one he had not yet received. If one had come it would have been sent to the hotel, but he went and enquired morning and evening, just for the love of it, or of her, I supposed. At any rate, he couldn’t help it.
We then went for a promenade on the Bóvedas along the seashore. The tide, which rises thirteen feet, was out and the flat rocky bed of the bay lay exposed for more than a hundred yards. Two men of slow and deliberate intentions were digging a trench from the sea wall out to the water’s edge at low tide for the benefit of the sewer pipes. The sewers which emptied just outside of the sea wall were to be extended out to that point. This improvement would do away with some of the bad smells that had followed the daily exposure of the sea bottom by the recession of the water. The bad smells at low tide did not, however, seem to cause much sickness, the regular return of the salt water acting as a disinfectant and douche. The offense to the olfactories was probably the worst feature of the emptying of the sewage near the shore. Individual perfumery would have been cheaper and perhaps more efficacious, but the men had not thought of that, and the ladies had never told them. Whether it was too early in the day for promenading, or whether there was but little promenading done on Las Bóvedas I do not know (probably both), but the only fashionable people we met were Señor McGill and his party, consisting of two ladies and a gentleman besides himself. A few children and two men of the poorer class were the only other persons visible.
OCEAN FRONT AT PANAMA