The town was small, but its business was larger than that of many great cities. The little city lay at the point where the Ohio River runs into the Mississippi. From up and down the Mississippi, from the Ohio, from the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and even from far up the Missouri, great fleets of steamboats were landing at Cairo every day to load and unload cargoes representing a wealth as great as that of the Indies. A double-headed railroad from the North, carrying the produce of half a dozen States, and connecting by other roads with all the great cities of the land, made its terminus at Cairo. Two railroads from the South--traversing five States--ended their lines at Columbus, a little farther down the river, and 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.