three tiny donkeys laden with yams and cocoanuts; a string of motor-cars full of American tourists, bound for the ruins of Old Panama (they'll be going there in trolley-cars before the Canal is opened); a big Zone Police trooper saluting the President of Panama in his heavy carriage, painted with the arms of the republic; and two black-robed priests talking to a sturdy negro boy, whose only covering was the water running down his back from the five-gallon Standard Oil tin he was carrying on his shoulder, by way of a bucket. Often, when we cantered home through the swarming negro suburb of Calidonia, and up over the high-arched bridge across the tracks at the Panama Railroad station, I thought how for a hundred yards that road had been covered with dead and dying men, when a charging column of revolutionists was raked by a machine-gun placed on that bridge and operated by an American soldier of fortune in the Colombian service. That was in the unsuccessful revolution of 1901. To-day that soldier of fortune is a drill-foreman in the Cut.
At the Panama Railroad station (they are building a handsome new one of terra-cotta and concrete), you can take a "spickety" cab to any part of Panama City, or the American suburb of Ancon for ten cents, American, or twenty cents, spickety. What is "spickety"? When the Americans first came to the Isthmus, the drivers of the native cabs (rickety little two-seated buggies drawn by ponies as big as rabbits) used to cry, "Me speak it, the English!" which meant "I speak English," but sounded like "Me spickety English." So our men began to call their speech "spickety English," and their
