We left the next morning, of course, without the date of the dedication day, but what information was lacking on this point was amply made up in information concerning the population. We asked seven people the question and received seven different answers, ranging from three hundred to five thousand. We counted a hundred odd houses, indicating six or seven hundred people, but no one there had any idea or any interest in the matter. What difference did it make anyway? The town of Nata, eighty miles west of Panama, was founded in 1520, one year after the founding of Old Panama, and one hundred years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Old Panama has been a ruin for two and one half centuries, leaving Nata as the oldest inhabited town in the New World--no small distinction. [Illustration: "THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT"] I asked the leading official if he knew how old the town was, and he said that he understood that it was "very old." When I suggested that it was the oldest town in America he nodded politely and talked of something else. I called on the priest, an intelligent and friendly man, who also understood that the town "was very old," but its priority of claim to the oldest living municipal inhabitant of the Americas had little interest for him. He talked on, complaining bitterly of the bad morals of the people and the small financial proceeds which the parish yielded its spiritual leader. It is easy to disparage any people, especially if they speak a different language from your own. Most of the things said against the illiterate natives of any country are true, but the trouble is that they are only a small fraction of the truth. A large employer of native labor, who took pride in treating his men well and paying them promptly, complained to me that he never could keep steady labor on his place for the reason that the men earned enough in one week to keep them drunk for the next fortnight, and hence worked only one week out of three, leaving their families to starve or shift for themselves as best they might. And he told the truth. But he did not tell it all. This same employer distilled the rum on his own place and regarded it as a paying business. When other employers raised the price for labor and produce he refused to do so on the ground that the more they had the worse off they were. On the surface it might seem to be true.