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Public characters throng in Colon. A town with but sixty years of history naturally abounds in early inhabitants. It is almost as bad as Chicago was a few years ago when citizens who had reached the “anecdotage” would halt you at the Lake Front and pointing to that smoke-bedimmed cradle of the city’s dreamed-of future beauty would assure you that they could have bought it all for a pair of boots—but didn’t have the boots. One of the figures long pointed out on the streets of Colon was an old colored man—an “ole nigger” in the local phrase—who had been there from the days of the alligators and the monkeys. He worked for the Panama Railroad surveyors, the road when completed, the French and the American Canal builders. A sense of long and veteran public service had invested him with an air of dignity rather out of harmony with his raiment. “John Aspinwall” they called him, because Aspinwall was for a time the name of the most regal significance on the island. The Poet of Panama immortalized him in verse thus: