V 

“DISCRIMINATION” IN MEMPHIS

A night’s railway journey on the Illinois Central carries you from Louisville to Memphis, Tennessee, and from the Ohio to the Mississippi. You strike the Father of Waters some time before you reach Memphis. Here two sets of literary associations were awakened in my mind. We passed through miles of swampy, malarial-looking forests, with snake-like vines binding the trees together; and every here and there would come a clearing on the river-bank, still bristling with huge gaunt stumps of dead timber, and showing a melancholy cabin or two, which forcibly recalled the Eden of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” And then, again, in some quiet backwater, we would see a great raft of lumber, with a hut or tent on it—the very raft of Huckleberry Finn and Jim. So strongly have the great rivers always appealed to my imagination that the first thing I did in Memphis was to go down to the wharf and ascertain whether I could not travel at least part of the way to New Orleans by steamer. There are plenty of huge sternwheel boats, still on the river; but alas! their movements 39are not arranged in view of passenger traffic. Only in short stages, and at great expenditure of time, could I have carried out my ambition. Baffled at Memphis, I still hoped to take boat from Vicksburg to Natchez; but I found that I should have to wait two days for a boat, and should then spend two more days in covering a distance which I could do by rail in a single night. So, except for a short excursion at New Orleans, I did not go a-sailing on the waters of the Mississippi.

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Memphis is a much brighter, cleaner, more alert and prosperous-looking place than Louisville. |Charity and Colour.| There are shops on Main Street that would make a good figure in Paris; and at night it is as gay with electricity as the “Great White Way” of New York. When I arrived, Memphis was evidently in the thick of some excitement. The side-walks of Main Street were crowded with ladies, young and—less young, who were making dashes at every male passer-by, and seeking to pin a square purple badge to the lapel of his coat. It was soon evident that life was not worth living unless you wore one of these badges; so I secured one, at the expense of half-a-dollar, and on examining it found that it was inscribed—“Tag-Day for the Tennessee Home for Incurables.” This was, in fact, a sort of Hospital Saturday, and the tag pinned to your coat was a certificate that you had paid up.

|Charity and Colour.|

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