Apropos of Arkansas, I am reminded that Memphis is not only the metropolis of Tennessee, but is the big city of Arkansas and Mississippi, as well.  The Peabody Hotel in Memphis, a somewhat old-fashioned hostelry, is a sort of Arkansas political headquarters, and is sometimes humorously referred to as “Peabody township, Arkansas.”  It is also used to a considerable extent by Mississippi politicians, as well as by the local breed.  The Peabody grill has a considerable reputation for good cookery, and the Peabody bar, though it still looks like a bar, serves only soft drinks, which are dispensed by female “bartenders.”  The Gayoso hotel, named for the Spanish governor who intruded upon Memphis territory for a time, stands where stood the old Gayoso, which figured in Forrest’s raid.  The Gayoso made me think a little of the old Victoria, in New York, torn down some years ago.  The newest hotel in town, at the time of our visit, was the Chicsa, an establishment having a large and rather flamboyant office, and considerably used, we were told, as a place for conventions.  If I were to go again to Memphis I should have a room at the Gayoso and go to the Peabody for meals.

The axis of the earth, which Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city,” sticks out in Memphis at Court Square, which the good red Baedeker dismisses briefly with the remark that it “contains a bust of General Andrew Jackson and innumerable squirrels.”  This is not meant to indicate that the squirrels are a part of the bust of Jackson.  The two are separate and distinct.  So are the pigeons which alight on friendly hands and shoulders as do other confident pigeons on Boston Common, and in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice.

I am always disposed to like the people of a city in which pigeons and squirrels are tame.  Every day, at noon, an old policeman, a former Confederate soldier I believe he is, comes into the square with a basket of corn.  When he arrives all the pigeons see him and rush toward him in a great flapping cloud, brushing past your face if you happen to be walking across the square at the time.  Nor is he the only one to feed them.  Numbers of citizens go at midday to the square, where they buy popcorn and peanuts for the squirrels and pigeons—­which, by the way, are all members of old Memphis families, being descendants of other squirrels and pigeons which lived in this same place before the Civil War.  One might suppose that the pigeons, being able to fly up to the seventeenth floor windowsills of the Merchants’ Exchange Building, where men of the grain and hay bureau of the exchange are in the habit of leaving corn for them, would prosper more than the squirrels, but that is not the case for—­and I regret to have to report such immorality—­the squirrels are in the habit of adding to the stores of peanuts which are thrown to them, by thievery.  Like rascally urchins they will watch the peanut venders, and when their backs are turned, will make swift dashes at the peanut stands, seizing nuts and scampering away again.  Sometimes the venders detect them, and give chase for a few steps, but that is dangerous, for the minute the vender goes after one squirrel, others rush up and steal more.  It is saddening to find that even squirrels are corrupted by metropolitan life!