'Fearful clamors issue from many houses;then after a season they cease,and all is still:noble,self-sacrificing men come with the coffin,nail it up,and carry it away,to the graveyard.
In the night stillness reigns.Only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets;and out of the distance,at intervals,comes the muffled thunder of the railway train,which with the speed of the wind,and as if hunted by furies,flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.'
But there is life enough there now.The population exceeds forty thousand and is augmenting,and trade is in a flourishing condition.We drove about the city;visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there;saw the fine residences,rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye;and got a good breakfast at the hotel.
A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi:has a great wholesale jobbing trade;foundries,machine shops;and manufactories of wagons,carriages,and cotton-seed oil;and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators.
Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an increase of sixty thousand over the year before.Out from her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway;and a sixth is being added.
This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books long time ago.In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs.Trollope,Memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of log-houses,with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods;and now and then a pig,and no end of mud.
That was fifty-five years ago.She stopped at the hotel.
Plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast.
She says--
'The table was laid for fifty persons,and was nearly full.
They ate in perfect silence,and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun;the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks,with the unceasing chorus of coughing,ETC.'
'Coughing,etc.'The 'etc.'stands for an unpleasant word there,a word which she does not always charitably cover up,but sometimes prints.
You will find it in the following deion of a steamboat dinner which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters;wealthy,well-born,ignorant swells they were,tinselled with the usual harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy pretense--'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table;the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured;the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation;the loathsome spitting,from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses;the frightful manner of feeding with their knives,till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth;and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife,soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals,colonels,and majors of the old world;and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.'