As for the Granada, though a modest place, it was new and clean; the clerk was amiable, the beds comfortable, and if our rooms were too small to admit our trunks, they were, at all events, outside rooms, each with a private bath, at a rate of $1 per day apiece.  Never in any hotel have I felt that I was getting so much for my money.

Next morning, after breakfast, we set out to see the city.  Having repeatedly heard of Birmingham as the “Pittsburgh of the South,” we expected cold daylight to reveal the sooty signs of her industrialism, but in this we were agreeably disappointed.  By day as well as by night the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean—­the reason for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into the very center of Atlanta’s business and shopping district.

Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of Georgia.  The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even squares.  From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy, graceful grades into the hills to the southward.  Because of these grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills, and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon—­which is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in the United States.

Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly wooded golf links, above the road.

Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills.  Back of it rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road, which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham’s tallest building.  The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the block below.  The view commanded from these mountain perches does not suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands.  It seems to be a separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial equivalent for autumn haze.