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204 Each of them gets twice as much as a Jamaican, and more than earns it. Many of the Gallegos stick to their picturesque flat velvet caps and gay sashes. Then there are Italians, and Greeks, and Armenians, and Turks, and French-speaking negroes from Martinique, and turbaned coolies from India, and ever so many more besides. There are no Chinese or Japanese coolies, because the Republic of Panama excludes them by law, as does the United States. But almost everywhere in the two cities and the Zone, you can find a prosperous Chinese storekeeper, who was a coolie in the days of de Lesseps.

It is a motley and interesting crowd that throngs round the pay-car when it goes over the line twice a month. At every stop the men file up steps on one side of the car and down the other, past open counters piled high with silver and gold. (Several times the springs of the pay-car have been broken by the weight of its load of coin.) The men are paid, not by name, because most of them cannot write, and many of them often change their names whenever a new one strikes their fancy, but by the number on the brass check which every employee carries at his belt. There has never been any attempt to "hold up" the pay-train, though it is only guarded by half a dozen policemen. But they are very bad men to start a fight with, these tall, bronzed ex-troopers of the United States Cavalry, in the smart olive-green uniform of the Zone Police. They are the men who have made brigandage a lost art on the Isthmus, and taught the Panamanians to vote with ballots instead of machetes and Mauser rifles. About two hundred and fifty of this efficient little military constabulary, much resembling the