The most conspicuous objects one meets with in this dismal place are flocks of turkey-buzzards (useful inspectors or nuisances, as they do their own work of removal), pigs, naked dirty little children in legions, blear-eyed mangy curs that do nothing but growl and sleep; together with peddling darkies, bummers, and loafers (I know no other names so expressive of this species of idler as these Transatlantic ones), that employ their time much in the same fashion as the curs. A line of shops faces the sea, and at a little distance is the ‘mingillo,’ or native marketplace, a spot no one would be disposed to linger in or visit a second time, unless the nose could be dispensed with. ‘Noses have they but they smell not,’ must surely apply to the dwellers in the marketplace; the air is _literally_ (and not in figure of speech only) _laden_ with the mingled fragrance of past and present victims, an odour far more potent than pleasant. Surely ladies never go to market in Colon! The train was by this time ready to take us to Panama, and, with a parting scream, the iron horse rushed into the tropical wilderness. On leaving Colon, the line winds its way through a deep cutting across a morass, and along the right bank of the Rio Chagres; glimpses are caught of the river from amidst the tangled and twisted foliage that shuts it in on either side like dense walls. From out this leafy chaos rise the gaunt trunks of the mango, cocoanut, plane, cieba, and stately palm. Plantains, too, spread their green succulent leaves—sunshades of nature’s own contriving—to protect the tender growths that love to live beneath them. Every tree seemed strangling in the coils of trailing vines and climbers; real ropes, pendents, and streamers of brilliant blossoms, fit resting-places for the birds and butterflies, themselves like living flowers. Wondrous orchids, grotesque in form and colouring, grew everywhere, springing alike from the living and the dead; for amidst this flood of vegetable life, decay and beauty, like twin sisters, walk hand-in-hand.