On every hand, lightly
sprinkled with many other dialects, sounds Spanish, the slovenly
Spanish of Panama in which bueno is "hueno" and calle is "caye."
As he swings languidly to the right 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.
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