Your first introduction to the beauty of Panama architecture comes from a building that fronts you as you leave your train. Three stories high it has the massive strength of a confectioner’s creations, and is tastefully colored a sickly green, relieved by stripes of salmon pink, with occasional interludes of garnet and old gold. The fact that it houses a saloon, the proportions of which would be generous on the Bowery or South Clark Street, does not explain this brilliant color scheme. It is merely the expression of the local color sense, and is quite likely to be employed to lend distinction to a convent school or a fashionable club indiscriminately. From the Railway Plaza--originality has not yet furnished a more attractive name--the Avenida Centrale stretches away in a generally southerly direction to the seawall at the city’s end. What Broadway is to New York, the Corso to Rome, or Main Street to Podunk, this street is to Panama. It is narrow and in time will be exceedingly crowded, for the rails of a trolley line are laid on one side, and some time in the leisurely Panamanian future the cars will run through the old town and so on out to Balboa where the Americans are building the great docks at the entrance to the Canal. Just now however it is chiefly crowded with the light open carriages which toward eventide carry up and down the thoroughfare olive-complexioned gentlemen who look smilingly at the balconies on either side whence fair ones--of varying degrees of fairness with a tendency toward the rich shade of mahogany--look down approvingly. [Illustration: THE BULL RING; BULL FIGHTS ARE NOW PROHIBITED] [Illustration: THE PANAMA WATER FRONT]