A SUPERSTITION.

It was the custom in those days for slaves to carry voo-doo bags. It was
handed down from generation to generation; and, though it was one of the
superstitions of a barbarous ancestry, it was still very generally and
tenaciously held to by all classes. I carried a little bag, which I got
from an old slave who claimed that it had power to prevent any one who
carried it from being whipped. It was made of leather, and contained
roots, nuts, pins and some other things. The claim that it would prevent
the folks from whipping me so much, I found, was not sustained by my
experience--my whippings came just the same. Many of the servants were
thorough believers in it, though, and carried these bags all the time.

* * * * *

MEMPHIS AND ITS COMMERCIAL IMPORTANCE.

The city of Memphis, from its high bluff on the Mississippi, overlooks
the surrounding country for a long distance. The muddy waters of the
river, when at a low stage, lap the ever crumbling banks that yearly
change, yielding to new deflections of the current. For hundreds of
miles below there is a highly interesting and rarely broken series of
forests, cane brakes and sand bars, covered with masses of willows and
poplars which, in the spring, when the floods come down, are overflowed
for many miles back. It was found necessary to run embankments
practically parallel with the current, in order to confine the waters of
the river in its channel. Memphis was and is the most important city of
Tennessee, indeed, the most important between St. Louis and New Orleans,
particularly from the commercial point of view. Cotton was the principal
product of the territory tributary to it. The street running along the