It is the “gum-shoe’s” duty to know and be unknown in as many places as possible.  Wherefore on such nights, whatever his choice, he drifts early down by the “Normandie” and on into the “Pana-zone” to see who is out, and why.  In the latter emporium he adds a bottle of beer to his expense account, endures for a few moments the bawling above the scream of the piano of two Americans of Palestinian antecedents, admires some local hero, like “Baldy” for instance, who is credited with doing what Napoleon could not do, and floats on, perhaps to screw up his courage and venture into the thinly-clad Teatro Apolo.  He who knows where to look, or was born under a lucky star, may even see on these merry evenings a big Marine from Bas Obispo or a burly soldier of the Tenth howling some joyful song with six or seven little “Spig” policemen climbing about on his frame.  At such times everything but real blood, flows in Panama.  Her history runs that way.  On the day she won her independence from Spain it is said the General in Chief cut his finger on a wine glass.  The day she won it from Colombia there was a Chinaman killed—­but every one agrees that was due to the celestial’s criminal carelessness.

Down at the quieter end of the city are “Las Bovedas,” that curving sea-wall Phillip 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