quarter that has shot up like a Western boom-town since 1904, round what used to be the little suburb of Santa Anna, outside the city wall. The old church of Santa Anna—once the family chapel of a Spanish grandee—still stands on the plaza of that name, with a dance-hall on one side, a vaudeville theater on the other, and saloons all round it.
A few blocks beyond Santa Anna Plaza, you pass a street-shrine with ever-lighted candles that marks the site of the landward gate, and enter the old part of the town. Here the houses have walls three feet thick, and narrow windows with very stout shutters, for, in the disorderly old days, it was frequently necessary to turn them into fortresses on short notice. Even the churches were loopholed for musketry, and they are still connected by underground passages with the cathedral in the center of the town. When you walk down one of the narrow streets at night, under the long double row of Spanish balconies, you half expect to see a file of halberdiers go clanking past in the moonlight, or to hear the "clink and fall of swords." But all you hear is a cheap phonograph playing an American popular song of the year before last, and the only armed men you meet are self-important little native policemen, about four and a half feet high. It takes several of them to arrest one drunken Canal laborer.
This national police is the nearest approach to an army they have in Panama. On the site of the old Colombian barracks, the Panamanians have built a handsome Government Palace, that is a combination White House, Treasury Building, and National Theater. Whenever
