“Stand! Stand to your glasses steady, ’Tis all we have left to prize, One cup to the dead already, Hurrah, for the next that dies”. Wine, wassail and, I fear, women were much in evidence during the hectic period of the French activities. The people of the two Isthmian towns still speak of it as the _temps de luxe_. Dismal thrift was banished and extravagance was the rule. Salaries were prodigious. Some high officials were paid from $50,000 to $100,000 a year with houses, carriages, traveling expenses and uncounted incidentals. Expenditures for residences were lavish, and the nature of the structures still standing shows that graft was the chief factor in the cost. The director-general had a $40,000 bath-house, and a private railway car costing $42,000--which is curiously enough almost exactly $1000 for each mile of the railroad it traversed. The hospital buildings at Colon cost $1,400,000 and one has but to look at them today to wonder how even the $400,000 was spent. The big graft that finally was one of the prime factors in wrecking the company was in Paris, but enough went on in Colon and Panama to make those two towns as full of easy money as a mining camp after a big strike. The pleasures of such a society are not refined. Gambling and drinking were the less serious vices. A French commentator of the time remarks, “Most of the commercial business of Panama is transacted standing and imbibing cocktails--always the eternal cocktail! Afterward, if the consumer had the time and money to lose, he had only to cross the hall to find himself in a little room, crowded with people where roulette was going on. Oh this roulette, how much it has cost all grades of canal employees! Its proprietor must make vast profits. Admission is absolutely free; whoever wishes may join in the play. A democratic mob pushes and crowds around the table. One is elbowed at the same time by a negro, almost in rags, anxiously thrusting forward his ten sous, and by a portly merchant with his pockets stuffed with piasters and bank notes”. These towns, which bought and consumed French champagnes and other wines by the shipload, could not afford to build a water system. Water was peddled in the streets by men carrying great jars, or conducting carts with tanks. There were millions for roulette, poker and the lottery, but nothing for sewers or pavements and during the wet season the people, natives and French both, waded ankle deep in filth which would have driven a blooded Berkshire hog from his sty. When from these man-created conditions of drink and dirt, disease was bred and men died like the vermin among which they lived, they blamed the climate, or the Chagres River.