BACHELOR QUARTERS AT TORO POINT
If you keep a shrewd and watchful eye on the balconies above the cheap john stores you will now and again catch a little glimpse reminiscent of Pekin. For the Chinese like to hang their balconies with artistic screens, bedeck them with palms, illuminate them with the gay lanterns of their home. Sometimes a woman of complexion of rather accentuated brunette will hang over the rail with a Chinese—or at least a Chinesque—baby in the parti-colored clothing of its paternal ancestors. Or as you stroll along the back or side streets more given over to residences, an open door here and there gives a glimpse of an interior crowded with household goods—and household gods which are babies. Not precisely luring are these views. They suggest rather that the daily efforts of Col. Gorgas to make and keep the city clean might well have extended further behind the front doors of the house. They did to a slight degree, of course, for there was fumigation unlimited in the first days of the great cleaning up, and even now there is persistent sanitary inspection. The Canal Zone authorities relinquished to the Panama local officials the paving and sanitation work of the city, but retained it in Colon, which serves to indicate the estimate put upon the comparative fitness for self government of the people of the two towns.
A COLON WATER CARRIER
Down by the docks, if one likes the savor of spices and the odor of tar, you find the real society of the Seven Seas. Every variety of ship is there, from the stately ocean liner just in from Southampton or Havre to the schooner-rigged cayuca with its crew of San Blas Indians, down from their forbidden country with a cargo of cocoanuts, yams and bananas. A curious craft is the cayuca. Ranging in size from a slender canoe twelve feet long and barely wide enough to hold a man to a considerable craft of eight-foot beam and perhaps 35 to 40 feet on the water line, its many varieties have one thing in common. Each is hewn out of a single log. Shaped to the form of a boat by the universal tool, the machete, and hollowed out partly by burning, partly by chipping, these great logs are transformed into craft that in any hands save those of the Indians bred to their use, would be peremptory invitations to a watery death. But the San Blas men pole them through rapids on the Chagres that would puzzle a guide of our North Woods, or at sea take them out in northers that keep the liner tied to her dock. Some of these boats by the way are hollowed from mahogany logs that on the wharf at New York or Boston would be worth $2,000.
AN OPEN SEWER IN A COLON STREET
The history of the Panama Railroad may well be briefly sketched here. For its time it was the most audacious essay in railway building the world had known, for be it known it was begun barely twenty years after the first railroad had been built in the United States and before either railroad engineers or railroad labor had a recognized place in industry. The difficulties to be surmounted were of a sort that no men had grappled with before. Engineers had learned how to cut down hills, tunnel mountains and bridge rivers, but to build a road bed firm enough to support heavy trains in a bottomless swamp; to run a line through a jungle that seemed to grow up again before the transit could follow the axe man; to grapple with a river that had been known to rise forty feet in a day; to eat lunch standing thigh deep in water with friendly alligators looking on from adjacent logs, and to do all this amid the unceasing buzz of venomous insects whose sting, as we learned half a century later, carried the germs of malaria and yellow fever—this was a new draft upon engineering skill and endurance that might well stagger the best. The demand was met. The road was built, but at a heavy cost of life. It used to be said that a life was the price of every tie laid, but this was a picturesque exaggeration. About 6000 men in all died during the construction period.
BY A COCLÉ BROOK