Public characters throng in Colon. A town with but sixty years of history naturally abounds in early inhabitants. It is almost as bad as Chicago was a few years ago when citizens who had reached the “anecdotage” would halt you at the Lake Front and pointing to that smoke-bedimmed cradle of the city’s dreamed-of future beauty would assure you that they could have bought it all for a pair of boots--but didn’t have the boots. One of the figures long pointed out on the streets of Colon was an old colored man--an “ole nigger” in the local phrase--who had been there from the days of the alligators and the monkeys. He worked for the Panama Railroad surveyors, the road when completed, the French and the American Canal builders. A sense of long and veteran public service had invested him with an air of dignity rather out of harmony with his raiment. “John Aspinwall” they called him, because Aspinwall was for a time the name of the most regal significance on the island. The Poet of Panama immortalized him in verse thus: “Oh, a quaint old moke, is John Aspinwall, Who lives by the Dead House gate, And quaint are his thoughts, if thoughts at all Ever lurk in his woolly pate, For he’s old as the hills is this coal-black man, Thrice doubled with age is he, And the days when his wanderings first began Are shrouded in mystery.” [Illustration: BACHELOR QUARTERS AT TORO POINT] If you keep a shrewd and watchful eye on the balconies above the cheap john stores you will now and again catch a little glimpse reminiscent of Pekin. For the Chinese like to hang their balconies with artistic screens, bedeck them with palms, illuminate them with the gay lanterns of their home. Sometimes a woman of complexion of rather accentuated brunette will hang over the rail with a Chinese--or at least a Chinesque--baby in the parti-colored clothing of its paternal ancestors. Or as you stroll along the back or side streets more given over to residences, an open door here and there gives a glimpse of an interior crowded with household goods--and household gods which are babies. Not precisely luring are these views. They suggest rather that the daily efforts of Col. Gorgas to make and keep the city clean might well have extended further behind the front doors of the house. They did to a slight degree, of course, for there was fumigation unlimited in the first days of the great cleaning up, and even now there is persistent sanitary inspection. The Canal Zone authorities relinquished to the Panama local officials the paving and sanitation work of the city, but retained it in Colon, which serves to indicate the estimate put upon the comparative fitness for self government of the people of the two towns. [Illustration: A COLON WATER CARRIER]