The anchors were removed to some safe spot and in due time will form part of the historic decorations of the new city of Balboa. [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ WATER GATES IN LOCK WALL Through these gates the water is admitted to the great conduit in the center wall of the lock] [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ THE LAKE ABOVE GATUN] Doubtless by the standards of these days the wealth that was carried back and forth along the Royal Road by men crushed low like termite ants beneath their heavy burdens, was not great. Yet one gets some idea of the volume of the trade from Bancroft’s statement that in the year 1624, just four years after the landing of the Mayflower, goods to the amount of 1,446,346 pesos d’oro (practically an equal number of dollars), were registered at the Casa, or custom house, while probably 7¹⁄₂ millions of dollars’ worth of goods were smuggled through. There were great warehouses then and a stone church with a neighboring monastery to which it was customary to send the children of the richer people at Nombre de Dios to be kept until they had attained their seventh year. For that piously named town was almost a plague spot and its miasmatic atmosphere was fatal to tender infants. The paved trail echoes no more with the muleteer’s cry, or the clatter of hoofs, nor are there wine shops to tempt the traveler, for there are none to be tempted. But even in its palmiest days Cruces could have been but a dismal spot. Gage, a soldier of fortune and an itinerant preacher, visited the village in 1638 and left us this record: “Before ten of the clock we got to Venta de Cruces where lived none but mulattoes and blackmores who belong unto the flat boates that merchandize to Portobel. There I had much good entertainment by the people who desired me to preach unto them the next Sabbath day and gave me twenty crownes for my sermon and procession. After five days of my abode there, the boats set out, which were much stopped in their passage down the river, for in some places we found the water very low, so that the boats ran upon the gravel; from whence with poles and the strength of the blackmores they were to be lifted off again”. After the lapse of almost four centuries we found the shallows still there and the blackmores--or their descendants--ready to carry our boat past their fall. But the people who paid the early traveler twenty crowns for a sermon had vanished as irrevocably as the city’s public edifices, and no descendants of like piety remain. Morgan’s fierce raiders swept through the village in 1670, and its downfall may have begun then, for the stout Protestantism of the buccaneers manifested itself in burning Catholic churches and monasteries in intervals of the less pious, but more pleasing, occupation of robbing the Spaniards or torturing them to extort confessions of the hiding places of their wealth. [Illustration: HOW THEY GATHER AT THE RIVER]