Clubs share with churches in the social life of Panama. Perhaps indeed they rather outshine the latter. At any rate such buildings as the Union Club and the University Club, both of which abut upon the bay would be a credit to a city twice the size. The former club, as its name implies, was intended to be a meeting place where liberals and conservatives could lay aside political differences in social unity. However, politics in Panama, as in all places where there are not real vital issues dividing the parties, breeds bitter personal feeling and the Union Club is said to be far from being the home of political unity. It has, however, an excellent building, with a spacious ball-room, a swimming tank and a magnificent view of Panama Bay with its picturesque islands. The University Club is more an American club than a Panamanian, and it no longer observes the restriction as to membership which its name would imply. It too has a spacious ball-room and is a social center for the Zone dwellers who form the major part of its membership. The Cathedral Plaza is socially the center of town, though geographically the old French Plaza of Santa Ana is more near the center. Directly opposite the Cathedral is the Hotel Centrale, built after the Spanish fashion, with four stories around a central court. In the blither days of the French régime this court was the scene of a revelry to which the daily death roll formed a grim contrast. However the occasional gaiety of the Centrale Patio did not end with the French. Even in the prosaic Yankee days of the last carnival the intervention of the police was necessary to prevent a gentleman from being wholly denuded, and displayed to the revelers in nature’s garb as a specimen of the superior products of Panama. [Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_ BUST OF LIEUT. NAPOLEON B. WYSE This bust stands on the sea wall. The picture shows it guarded by a United States soldier and a Panama policeman] On a nearby corner of the Plaza is the old French administration building, afterward occupied by the Isthmian Canal Commission. In 1905 it was a central point of infection for the yellow-fever epidemic, and though repeatedly fumigated was finally abandoned by the American engineers who moved their headquarters out to Culebra.