lip of Spain tried to make out from his palace walls, as
many another, regal and otherwise, has strained his eyes in vain to see
where his good coin has gone. But the walls are there all right, though
Phillip never saw them; crumbling a bit, yet still a sturdy barrier to
the sea. A broad cement and grass promenade runs atop, wide as an
American street. Thirty or forty feet below the low parapet sounds the
deep, time-mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher and
higher up the rock ledges that great tide so different from the
scarcely noticeable one at Colon. The summer breeze never dies down,
never grows boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies mumbling to
itself, down in the hollow between squats Chiriqui prison with its
American warden, once a Zone policeman; while in the round stone
watch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison guards with fixed
bayonets and incessantly blow the shrill tin whistles that is the
universal Latin-American artifice for keeping policemen awake. On the
way back to the city the elite--or befriended--may drop in at the
University Club at the end of the wall for a cooling libation.

On Sunday night comes the band concert in the palm-ringed Cathedral
Plaza. There is one on Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa Ana, but that is
packed with all colors and considered "rather vulgah." In the square by
the cathedral the aggregate color is far lighter. Pure African blood
hangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then the haughty aristocrats of Panama,
proud of their own individual shade of color, may be seen in the same
promenade with American ladies--even a garrison widow or two--from out
along the line. Panamanian girls gaudily dressed and suggesting to the
nostrils perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth with their
perfumed dandies. Above the throng pass the heads and shoulders of
unemotional, self-possessed Americans, erect and soldierly. Sergeant
Jack of Ancon station was sure to be there in his faultless civilian
garb, a figure neat but not gaudy; and even busy Lieutenant Long was
known to break away from his stacked-up duties and his black
stenographer and come to overtop all else in the square save the
palm-trees whispering together in the evening breeze between the
numbers.

There is no favoritism in Zone police work. Every crime reported
receives full investigation, be it only a Greek laborer losing a pair
of trousers or--

There was the case that fell to me early in May, for ins