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.
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