If that country alone is happy whose history is uninteresting, then sorrow must have been the ordained lot of Panama. Visited first by Columbus in 1502, at which time the great navigator put forth every effort to find a strait leading through to the East Indies, it has figured largely in the pages of history ever since. Considerable cities of Spanish foundation rose there while our own Jamestown and Plymouth were still unimagined. The Spaniards were building massive walls, erecting masonry churches, and paving royal roads down there in the jungle long before the palisades and log huts of Plymouth rose on the sandy shores of Cape Cod Bay. If the ruins of the first city of Panama, draped with tropical vines, are all that remain of that once royal city, its successor founded in 1673 still stands with parts of the original walls sturdily resisting the onslaught of time. It appears there are certain advantages about geographical littleness. If Panama had been big the eyes of the world would never have been fastened upon it. Instinctively Columbus sought in each of its bays, opening from the Caribbean that strait which should lead to far Cathay. Seeking the same mythical passage Balboa there climbed a hill where “--with eagle eyes, He star’d at the Pacific--and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise Silent upon a peak in Darien.” Hope of a natural strait abandoned, the narrowness of the Isthmus made it the shortest route for Cortez, Pizarro and other famous Spanish robbers and murderers to follow in their quest for the gold of the Incas. As the Spaniards spoiled Peru, so the buccaneers and other pirates, belonging to foreign nations, robbed and murdered the Spaniards. The gold fever filled the narrow Isthmus full of graves, and of moldering bodies for which there was not even hasty sepulture. In time the Peruvian hoards were exhausted, Spaniards and Englishmen, buccaneers and pirates vanished. Then came a new invasion--this time by a nation unknown in the days of the Great Trade and the Royal Road. Gold had been discovered in California, and now troops of Americans fought their way through the jungle, and breasted the rapids of the Chagres River. They sought gold as had Pizarro and Cortez, but they sought it with spade and pan, not with sword and musket. In their wake came the Panama Railroad, a true pioneer of international trade. Then sprung up once more the demand for the waterway across the neck which Columbus had sought in vain.