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 Chagres, on this side of the Isthmus of Darien, which is the most unhealthy spot on this continent.  Excuse this diversion, I must get back to my subject, the days of the forty-niners.

I stopped at the American Hotel.  I was somewhat in a dilapidated condition from the experiences of my trip from Chagres.  The waiter in my room at the hotel took the best of care of me.  I soon found he was no ordinary waiter.  He had resigned a position in Washington of $2,000 a year to go to the gold Eldorado.  He had been in Panama several months, and had been taken down with the fever twice, which had exhausted his funds and was working at the hotel for his board, but never thought of turning back.  He was bound for California.  He was quite enfeebled from the effects of the fever.  He got hold of my sympathies and secured my friendship. (More of him anon.) I had been here four or five days