ght into
Avenida Central he grows gradually aware that there has settled down
about him a cold indifference, an atmosphere quite different from that
on his own side of the line. Those he addresses in the tongue of the
land reply to his questions with their customary gestures and fixed
phrases of courtesy. But no more; and a cold dead silence falls sharply
upon the last word, and at times, if the experience be comparatively
new, there seems to hover in the air something that reminds him that
way back fifty-six years ago there was a "massacre" of Americans in
Panama city. For the Panamanian has little love for the United States
or its people; which is the customary thanks any man or nation gets for
lifting a dirty half-breed gamin from the gutter.

Off in the vortex of the city lolls Panama's public market, where
Chinamen are the chief sellers and flies the chief consumers. Myriads
of fruits in every stage of development and disintegration, haggled
bits of meat, the hundred sights and sounds and smells one hurries past
suggest that Panama may even have outdone Central America before Uncle
Sam came with his garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at the
old harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama in
pre-canal days. Clumsy boats, empty, or deep-laden with fruit from, or
freight to, the several islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bump
against the little cement wharf. Aged wooden "windjammers" doze at
their moorings, everywhere are jabbering natives with that shifty
half-cast eye and frequent evidence of deep-rooted disease. Almost
every known race mingles in Panama city, even to Chinese coolies in
their umbrella hats and rolled up cotton trousers, delving in rich
market gardens on the edges of the town or dog-trotting through the
streets under two baskets dancing on the ends of a bamboo pole, till
one fancies oneself at times in Singapore or Shanghai. The black Zone
laborer, too, often prefers to live in Panama for the greater freedom
it affords--there he doesn't have to clean his sink so often, marry his
"wife," or banish his chickens from the bedroom. Policemen with their
clubs swarm everywhere, for no particular reason than that the little
republic is forbidden to play at army, and with the presidential
election approaching political henchmen must be kept good-humored. Not
a few of these officers are West Indians who speak not a word of
Spanish--nor any other tongue, strictly speaking.

Rubbe