PANAMA, February 28th, 1895.
[DEAR MOTHER:]
Griscom has awakened to the fact that he is a Press
correspondent and is interviewing rebels who come stealthily
by night followed by spies of the government and sit in
Griscom's room with the son of the Consul General, as
interpreter. Somerset and I refuse to be implicated and sit
in the plaza waiting for a file of soldiers to carry Griscom
off which is our cue for action. There is a man-of-war, the
Atlanta, the one we made friends with at Puerto Cortez,
lying at Colon and so we feel safe. We may now be said to be
absorbing local color. That is about all we have done since
we left Amapala. And if it were not that you are all alone up
there, I would not mind it. I would probably continue on. We
know it now as we do London or Paris. We can distinguish sea
captains, lawyers in politics, commandantes, oldest residents,
gentlemenly good for nothings, shipping agents and commission
dealers, coffee planters and men who are "on the beach" with
unerring eye. We know the story of each before he tells it,
or it is told by some one else. The Commandante shot a lot of
men by the side of a road during the last revolution, first
allowing them to dig their own graves and is here now so that
he can pay himself by stealing the custom dues,
the lawyer politician has been to Cornell and taken a medical
degree in Paris and aspires to be a deputy and only remembers
New York as the home of Lillian Russell. The commission
merchants are all Germans and the coffee planters are all
French. They point with pride to little bare-foot boys
selling sea shells and cocoanuts as their offspring, although
they cannot remember their names. The sea captains you can
tell by their ready made clothes of a material that would be
warm in Alaska and by them wearing Spanish dollars for watch
guards and by the walk which is rolling easily when sober and
pitching heavily toward the night. The oldest resident always
sits in front of the hotel and in the same seat, with a
tortoise shell cane and remembers when Vasquez or Mendoza or
Barrios, or Bonilla occupied the Cathedral and fired hot shot
into the Palace and everybody took refuge in the English
Consulate and he helped guard the bank all night with a
Springfield rifle. The men who are on the beach have just
come out of the hospital where they have had yellow fever and
they want food. This story is intended to induce you to get
rid of them hurriedly by a small token. Sometimes out of this
queer combination you will get a good story but generally they
want to show you a ruined abbey or a document as old as the
Spanish occupation or to make you acquainted with a man who
has pearls to sell, or a coffee plantation or a collection of
unused stamps which he stole while a post-office employee.
Our chief sport now is to go throw money at the prisoners who
are locked up in a row of dungeons underneath the sea wall.
The people walk and flirt and enjoy the sea breeze above them
and the convicts by holding a mirror between the bars of the
dungeons can see
who is leaning over the parapet above them. Then they hold
out their hands and you drop nickels and they fail to catch
them and the sentry comes up and teases them by holding the
money a few inches beyond their reach. They climb all over
the crossbars in their anxiety to get the money and look like
great monkeys. At night it is perfectly tremendous for their
is only a light over their heads and they crawl all over the
bars beneath this, standing on each other's shoulders and
pushing and fighting and yelling half naked and wholey black
and covered with sweat. As a matter of fact they are better
content to stay in jail than out and when the British Consul
offered to send eight of them back to Jamaica they refused to
go and said they would rather serve out their sentence of
eight years. This is the way the place looks and I am going
to introduce it in a melodrama and have some one lower files
down to the prisoners.
DICK.
After some not very eventful or pleasant days at Caracas,
Richard sailed for home and from the steamer wrote the
following letter:
