It was so with our town. From the snoreful profundities of a Rip Van Winkle sleep it woke up one morning to find itself made over; whether for better or worse I will not presume to say, but nevertheless, made over. Before this the natural boundaries to the north had been a gravel bluff which chopped off sharply above a shallow flat sloping away to the willows and the river beyond. Now this saucer-expanse was dotted over with mounds of made ground rising like pimples in a sunken cheek; and spreading like a red brick rash across the face of it, was a tin roofed, flat-topped irritation of structures--a cotton mill, a brewery, and a small packing plant dominating a clutter of lesser industries. Above these on the edge of the hollow, the old warehouse still stood, but the warehouse had lost its character while keeping its outward shape. Fifty years it resounded to a skirmish fire clamor of many hammers as the negro hands knocked the hoops off the hogsheads and the auctioneer bellowed for his bids; where now, brisk young women, standing in rows, pasted labels and drove corks into bottles of Dr. Bozeman's Infallible Cough Cure. Nothing remained to tell the past glories of the old days, except that, in wet weather, a faint smell of tobacco would steam out of the cracks in the floor; and on the rotted rafters over head, lettered in the sprawling chirography of some dead and gone shipping clerk, were the names and the dates and the times of record-breaking steamboat runs--_Idlewild_, Louisville to Memphis, so many hours and so many minutes; _Pat Cleburne_, Nashville to Paducah, so many hours and so many minutes. Nobody ever entered up the records of steamboat runs any more; there weren't any to be entered up. Where once wide side-wheelers and long, limber stern-wheelers had lain three deep at the wharf, was only a thin and unimpressive fleet of small fry-harbor tugs and a ferry or two, and shabby little steamers plying precariously in the short local trades. Along the bank ran the tracks of the railroad that had taken away the river business and the switch engines tooted derisively as if crowing over a vanquished and a vanished rival, while they shoved the box cars back and forth. Erecting themselves on high trestles like straddle bugs, three more railroads had come in across the bottoms to a common junction point, and still another was reliably reported to be on its way. Wherefore, the Daily Evening News frequently referred to itself as the Leading Paper of the Future Gateway of the New South. It also took the Associated Press dispatches and carried a column devoted to the activities of the Women's Club, including suffrage and domestic science.