With the coming of the French, flush times began again on the Isthmus and the golden flood poured most into Colon, as the Canal diggers made their main base of operations there, unlike the Americans who struck at nature’s fortifications all along the line, making their headquarters at Culebra about the center of the Isthmus. But though the French failed to dig the Canal they did win popularity on the Isthmus, and there are regretful and uncomplimentary comparisons drawn in the cafés and other meeting-places between the thrift and calculation of the Americans, and the lavish prodigality of the French. Everything they bought was at mining-camp prices and they adopted no such plan as the commissary system now in vogue to save their workers from the rapacity of native shopkeepers of all sorts. [Illustration: SAN BLAS LUGGER PUTTING OUT TO SEA] At Cristobal you are gravely taken to see the De Lesseps Palace, a huge frame house with two wings, now in the last stages of decrepitude and decay, but which you learn cost fabulous sums, was furnished and decorated like a royal château and was the scene of bacchanalian feasts that vied with those of the Romans in the days of Heliogabalus. At least the native Panamanian will tell you this, and if you happen to enjoy his reminiscences in the environment of a café you will conclude that in starting the Canal the French consumed enough champagne to fill it. [Illustration: THE ATLANTIC FLEET VISITS THE ISTHMUS] Mr. Tracy Robinson, a charming chronicler of the events of a lifetime on the Isthmus, says of this period: “From the time that operations were well under way until the end, the state of things was like the life at ‘Red Hoss Mountain’ described by Eugene Field: ‘When the money flowed like likker.... With the joints all throwed wide open, and no sheriff to demur.’ Vice flourished. Gambling of every kind and every other form of wickedness were common day and night. The blush of shame became practically unknown.” The De Lesseps house stands at what has been the most picturesque point in the American town of Cristobal. Before it stands a really admirable work of art, Columbus in the attitude of a protector toward a half-nude Indian maiden who kneels at his side. After the fashion of a world largely indifferent to art the name of the sculptor has been lost, but the statue was cast in Turin, for Empress Eugénie, who gave it to the Republic of Colombia when the French took up the Canal work. Buffeted from site to site, standing for awhile betwixt the tracks in a railroad freight yard, the spot on which it stood when viewed by the writer is sentimentally ideal, for it overlooks the entrance to the Canal and under the eyes of the Great Navigator, done in bronze, the ships of all the world will pass and repass as they enter or leave the artificial strait which gives substance to the Spaniard’s dream. [Illustration: ROOSEVELT AVENUE, CRISTOBAL, ABOUT TO LOSE ITS BEAUTY]