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.