The city was adapting itself, with remarkable rapidity, to the new order of things. “Sherman, his mark,” was still written too plainly to be soon effaced, in gaping windows and roofless houses, heaps of ruins on the principal corners and traces of unsparing destruction everywhere. The burnt district of Richmond was hardly more thoroughly destroyed than the central part of Atlanta; yet, with all the advantages of proximity to the North, abundant capital, and an influx of business and money from above the Potomac, Richmond was not half so far rebuilt as Atlanta. What is more remarkable, the men who were bringing a city out of this desert of shattered brick—raising warehouses from ruins, and hastily establishing stores in houses half finished and unroofed—were not Yankees, but pure Southerners. These people were taking lessons from Chicago, and deserved to have, as they then seemed likely to have, the foremost of the interior cities of the Gulf States. Not less than four thousand mechanics were at work; and at least as many more would have been employed, if it had been possible to secure building material enough to supply the enormous demand. A hundred and fifty or two hundred stores were already opened; and others found themselves unable to rent rooms for their goods. The streets were blockaded with drays and wagons. The four railroads were taxed to their utmost capacity, without beginning to supply all the demands upon them. The trade of the city was a third greater than it had ever been, in its most prosperous days before the war. But the faces one saw on the streets or behind the counters were not the faces of men with whom you would choose to do business. “I have spent five days here,” exclaimed a simple-hearted scientific man, as he greeted me; “I have spent years among the Black Feet, and have been pretty much over the world, but I never saw such demoralized faces. The war has destroyed their moral character. There isn’t one man in a score here I would trust with my carpet-bag.” The geologist was too severe, but the traces of the bad passions and disregard of moral obligations which the war has taught, are written almost as plainly on the faces as are Sherman’s marks on the houses of Atlanta. More tangible evidence of the war’s demoralization was to be found in the alarming insecurity of property and even of life. Passing about the dark, crooked streets of Atlanta after night, unaccompanied and unarmed, was worse than attempting a similar exploration of the Five Points, in New York, ten years ago. Murders were of frequent occurrence; and so common a thing as garroting attracted very little attention.