coarse bananas that are eaten fried—and yams—a sort of sweet potato—and they will take care of themselves until he is ready to harvest the crop. He can burn enough charcoal to cook his dinner, and gather and sell enough cocoanuts to buy the few yards of cloth needed to clothe himself and his family, and spend the rest on hound dogs, fighting-cocks, and lottery tickets. He can grow his own tobacco, and distill his own sugar-cane rum. Now that the Americans have put an end to the revolutions, the poor man on the Isthmus has not a care in the world, and is probably the laziest and happiest person on earth.
Besides bananas—which, by the way, grow the other way up from the way they hang by the door of the grocery—many different kinds of fruit are found in Panama. Mangoes and alligator-pears are great favorites with American visitors. On the Island of Taboga, in the Bay of Panama, grow some of the best pineapples in the world; not the little woody things we know in the North, but luscious big lumps of sugary pulp, soft enough to eat with a spoon. You have never tasted a pineapple until you have eaten a "Taboga pine."
Flowers are as abundant as fruit. There are whole trees full of gorgeous blossoms at certain seasons. Roses bloom during the greater part of the year and rare and valuable orchids abound in the jungle. If the Republic of Panama ever adopts a national flower, it should be that strange and beautiful orchid found only on the Isthmus, that the Spaniards called "El Espiritu Santo," the flower of the Holy Ghost. When it blooms, which it does only every other year, the petals fold
