Mother, Home, and--the Simple Life 212 Construction Days in Culebra-Gailard Cut 217 Gatun Spillway, Key to the Canal 224 Cristobal Streets 227 Fat Cattle of Cocle 228 Enchanted Islands in Gatun Lake 231 Panama Public Water Works, Interior Country 237 A Jungle Cathedral 242 Shoe-bills Are Small 248 FOREWORD The fine art of prowling may be achieved, but is more often a gift of those to the manner born. Professional globe-trotters are not prowlers. They are often the victims of their own sense of superiority. Personally conducted tours are little help to real prowling, and professional guides reduce the sight-seer to a machine for receiving "canned" information with gaping mouth, while with his free hand he extracts tips from his reluctant pocket. Prowling is an instinct, a sixth sense of locations and values. The prowler must have intuition and imagination and perseverance and historical perspective, but with these he must have something else--that inner vision that finds values in everything human. The expert explorer will find something interesting in Sahara, but almost any prowler will have a rare time in Panama. Probably no spot in the New World has served as the location of so many kinds of events and interests as this narrow neck of land between two continents. Brief histories of it have been well written, and the visitor should by all means read at least one of them. It remains for some seer yet to tell worthily the story of the four centuries that link the last discovery of the world's greatest explorer with the final achievement of the world's most skillful builders. Panama furnishes an epitome of history. Nearly everything that has ever happened anywhere in the world has had some counterpart or parallel in Panama, and of the coming results of the new forces now released on the Isthmus time alone can be the measure. This book makes no claims to consistency. Where contradictory characteristics abound and motives are much mixed, both sides may be faithfully set forth, but to reconcile them is a difficult matter. There will be no unified and consistent life on the Isthmus until the advancing civilization now there outgrows some of its present traits. Can one tell the truth about Panama and return to the Isthmus? That remains to be proven. Much depends on the spirit of the prowler. As well ask whether one can tell the truth about Chicago and be welcome to that metropolis. Probably Chicago would pay no attention to the comment, but Panama might take enough interest to notice. This is not a guidebook. Heaven forbid! It is merely a few notes of a prowler who found Panama interesting. CHAPTER I WHERE THE PROWLING IS GOOD