nd were connected with the northern lines by
steamboats from Cairo.

Cairo was the meeting place of commerce between the North and the South.
Out of the upper rivers came light-draught steamers. Plying the river
below were steamers of far different construction by reason of the
easier conditions of navigation there. At Cairo every steamboat--whether
from North or South--unloaded its freight for reshipment up or down the
river, as the case might be, upon steamboats of a different type, or by
rail. And all the freight brought North or South by rail must also be
transferred at Cairo, either to river steamers or to railroad cars.

The South was still thronged with Northern troops, numbering hundreds of
thousands, who must be fed and clothed, and otherwise supplied, and so
the government's own traffic through the town was in itself a trade of
vast proportions. But that was the smallest part of the matter. Now that
the war was at an end, the South was setting to work to rebuild itself.
From the Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers, from the lower
Mississippi, from the Arkansas, the Yazoo, the Red River, the White, the
St. Francis, and all the rest of the water-ways of the South, energetic
men, of broken fortune, were hurrying to market all the cotton that they
had managed to grow and to save during the war, in order that they might
get money with which to buy the supplies needed for the cultivation of
new crops.

Pretty nearly all this cotton came to Cairo, either for sale to eager
buyers there, or for shipment to the East and a market.

In return the planters and the southern merchants through whom they did
business were clamorous for such goods as they needed. Grain, hay, pork,
bacon, agricultural implements, seed potatoes, lime, plaster, lumber,
and everything else necessary to the rebuilding of southern homes and
industries, were pouring into Cairo and out again by train loads and
steamboat cargoes, night and day.

Even that was not all. For four years no woman in the South had
possessed a new gown, or new handkerchiefs, or a new toothbrush, or a
new set of window curtains, or a new comb, or new linen for her beds, or
new shoes of other than plantation make, or a new ribbon or bit of lace,
or anything else new. Now that the northern market was open for the sale
of cotton the country merchants of the South were besieged for all these
and a hundred other things, and their orders for goods from the North
added mightily t