he land up among themselves and became its
nobility, from whom the present rulers of Spain are descendants. It is
said that when conquered, the original inhabitants of Spain, to a great
extent, fled to their vessels, put to sea, and found the island of
Ireland, from which the present inhabitants are descendants. The second
alcalder was a negro as black as I have ever seen.

In the city of Panama in its days of prosperity, when under Spain, the
higher classes must have lived in great luxuries, the negroes their
slaves. The natives the peons were in a condition similar to slavery,
they could not leave the land as long as they owed any thing. But the
despotism of old Spain became so great that when they struck for
freedom, all classes united. They gave freedom to the negroes and the
peons, and even the priests of the Catholic church had been so
tyrannized over by the mother church in Spain that they joined the
revolutionists and all classes are represented in the government. I
called at a watchmaker's to have a crystal put in my watch. Two brothers
had furnished rooms like a parlor. I could not speak Spanish, nor they
English. I could speak a little French. I found they could speak it
fluently. I asked them where they learned it. They said, "At the Jesuit
college at Granada." Then one, of them, when he learned that I was from
the United States, went to the piano and played Hail Columbia as a
compliment to my country, which would trouble most of us to do the same
for their country.

There are now great trees growing up in the ruins of what was once its
great cathedral. The freebooter Morgan is said to have plundered one of
its altars of a million of gold and silver, and massacred many of its
inhabitants, perpetrating on them the atrocities that their ancestors
had upon the original natives. It is said that when Pizarro captured
Peru and took the Inca, their king, prisoner, he issued a decree that if
his subjects would fill a room with gold, he would release him, which
they did. Instead of doing it, he sentenced him to be burned at the
stake, and only commuted it to hanging on condition that he confessed
the Christian religion. Madam Roland, when she was about to be
guillotined in the French revolution, exclaimed, "O Liberty, what
crimes have been committed in thy name." O Christianity, what terrible
atrocities have been perpetrated in thy name!

Panama is a healthy city to those acclimated, facing a beautiful bay,
unlike