"In the old times," he continued, "when this was the principal route of travel between New York and San Francisco, the arrival of a steamer made a busy scene. Several hundred passengers were to be transferred, together with a large amount of mail and express matter; the passengers were packed into the cars as closely as possible, and when there was an unusual rush it took two or perhaps three trains to carry them all. In such cases the steerage passengers were sent away ahead of the others, while the cabin passengers and mails followed an hour or two later. Most of the passengers were encumbered with several articles of hand-baggage, together with oranges, bananas, and other fruits bought from the natives that swarmed around the station; you would have thought they were setting out for a journey of a week or more, and provisioning themselves accordingly, instead of a continuous ride of three or four hours over a railway. There was often a contest for places in the carriages, and many an impromptu fight has occurred on the spot where we are so peacefully standing."
Soon after the departure of the train Dr. Bronson and the youths returned to the hotel, where they found the official from the canal company awaiting them. He was accompanied by Mr. Colné, the secretary of the American committee of the company, and after the formalities of introduction were completed the party set out for the Atlantic entrance to the promised waterway from the Caribbean Sea to the Bay of Panama.
The entrance to the canal is on the mainland, just behind the island on which Aspinwall is situated. The island has been enlarged in this direction, and, when the great ditch is completed, Aspinwall will be its Atlantic terminus in much the same way that Suez is the Red Sea terminus of the Suez Canal.
Our friends were surprised at the magnitude of the works of the canal company, as they walked through the miniature city which has sprung up since the work of cutting the waterway was undertaken. There were acres and acres of warehouses and workshops, dwellings for the laborers, and residences of the officers, together with other edifices connected with the enormous enterprise. There was a scene of activity around the machine-shops, where engines and dredges were undergoing repairs, and it was difficult to believe that all this life had been infused into the tropical languor of the Isthmus in the past few years.
NATIVE MARKET, ASPINWALL.
Mr. Colné told the strangers that the new town had received the name of Christopher Columbus, in honor of the great navigator, who was believed to have visited the spot on his third voyage, at the time he discovered the bay in which Aspinwall is situated. "And here," said he, as they reached a row of neat cottages, "is the street called Charles de Lesseps; these houses were made in New York and then brought here and put together, and we have houses at other places of the same character. Most of our dredges were made in the United States, and an American company has taken the contract for a large part of our excavating. Part of the land on which the city is built was reclaimed from the bay by filling in with the earth dredged out for the canal and its approaches. Before we get through with the work we shall have changed the appearance of this part of the coast so that its friends will hardly know it.
"When we came here," he continued, "one of the first things we determined upon was the deepening of the harbor of Aspinwall up to the point where the canal is entered. As soon as the dredges were ready they went to work and made a channel that permits the largest ships to come up to the shore. We might have left it till the end of the enterprise, but it was better to have it done at the outset, as it facilitates the landing of our material."