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Rh walk out among the stranded boats, and hold a market there (see page 213). The tide comes rushing in, when it rises, in a great wave or bore, something like that in the Bay of Fundy, with a heavy roar that can be heard far inland on a still night. But at Colon, on the Atlantic, the rise and fall of the tide is less than two feet. This curious fact, that the tides rise and fall ten times as far on one side of the Isthmus as on the other, is doubtless what has caused the wide-spread belief that at Panama one ocean is higher than the other. People who say that, forget that the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific meet



at Cape Horn, and that sea-level is sea-level the world over.

Panama is about eight hundred miles from the equator, in the same latitude as Mindanao in the Philippines. Its climate is thoroughly tropical. Gilbert, the only poet the Isthmus has ever produced, summed it up neatly in the first stanza of one of his best-known poems, "The Land of the Cocoanut Tree":