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 description 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.’
Chapter 3O
Sketches by the Way
IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere,
and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over
the land, flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior;
and in places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about,
of men’s hard work gone to ruin, and all to be done
over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage.
A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;–hundreds of miles of it.
Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep,
in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm,
wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that
the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance
to discharge his trust,–and often in desperate weather.
Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed,
in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women,
if the man is sick or absent. The Government furnishes oil,
and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending.
A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month.