Not every one fled, however.  Leading citizens remained, forming a relief committee, and some brave helpers came from outside.  Thus the sick and needy were attended to, though of course many of the volunteers contracted the disease and perished.

Added to the epidemic there was, as so often happens in such circumstances, an outbreak of thievery and other crime, which had to be put down.  It is related that in the height of the epidemic hardly any one was seen upon the streets save an occasional nurse, doctor, or other member of the relief committee; household pets starved to death or fled the city; among the newspapers the staffs were so reduced that only two or three men were left in each office, and in the case of the “Appeal,” but one, that one Colonel J.M.  Keating, the proprietor, who stuck to Memphis and for a time wrote, set up and printed the paper without assistance, feeling that refugees must have news from the city.

The next year the epidemic came again, but in less violent form, there being, this time, but 2,000 cases.  However the effect was cumulative.  Memphis dropped from a city of nearly 50,000 to one of 20,000 and the reputation of the place was such that a bill was proposed in Congress to purchase the ground on which the city stood and utterly destroy it as unfit for human habitation.

Stricken as she was, however, Memphis “came back.”  A great campaign for sanitation was begun; city sewage-disposal was installed, and after a few years, artesian wells were bored for a new water supply.  And though, as we now know, yellow fever does not come from the same sources as typhoid, nevertheless the new sanitary measures did greatly reduce the city’s death rate.

Memphis, like all other cities, has her troubles now and then, but since the great pestilence there has never been a real disaster.  The city has grown and thriven.  Indeed, she had become so used to growing fast that when, in 1910, the Federal census gave her but 131,000, she indignantly demanded a recount, for she had been talking to herself, and had convinced herself that she had a great many more than that number of inhabitants.  However, the census was taken again, and the first count proved accurate.

CHAPTER L

MODERN MEMPHIS

To be charmed by the social side of a city, yet to find little to admire in its physical aspect, is like knowing a brilliant and beautiful woman whose housekeeping is not of the neatest.  If one were compelled to discuss such a woman, and wished to do so sympathetically but with truth, one might avoid brutal comment on the condition of her rooms by likening them to other rooms elsewhere:  rooms which one knew to be untidy, but which the innocent listener might not understand to be so.  By this device one may even appear to pay a compliment, while, in reality, indicating the grim truth.  In such a case, I, for example, might say that this supposititious lady’s rooms reminded me of those I occupied on the second floor of the famous restaurant called Antoine’s, in New Orleans; whereupon the reader, knowing the high reputation of Antoine’s cuisine, and never having seen the apartments to which I refer, might assume an implication very favorable.