Memphis is on a bluff of the Mississippi. How strange does this juxtaposition of the names of hoar antiquity and of yesterday sound in the ears of a European! And it will also seem strange to many that this city, whose name they had never heard mentioned, except as being that of a great city of the Pharaohs, has already a population of 84,000 inhabitants, and is so well situated that it is destined to become, under the reign of freedom, one of the largest of the second-class cities of the Union. A bluff is a river-cliff. It may be either an old and abandoned one (many miles of such bluffs are to be seen in the valley of the Platte, at considerable distances from the existing channel of the river), or it may be one at the foot of which the stream still runs. To the latter class belongs the bluff on which Memphis is built. It is of a soft sand, and large spaces of it have been escarped and graded between the city and the water’s edge, in such a manner as to enable the traffic to be carried on easily. A great many cotton bales were standing ready for shipment on the great river steamers. As these bales were spread out over the quays, occupying in this way much space, they suggested the idea of a great deal of traffic. One might perhaps have counted a thousand of them. But then I remembered that the whole of them would be but a very sorry cargo for one of the enormous steamers, the General Robert Lee, or the General Putman, on board of which I had lately been, and which were the largest vessels, excepting the Great Eastern, I had ever seen. They had stowage, I understood, for three thousand bales, and yet as you looked through their gilded and splendidly furnished saloons, 180 yards in length, and saw how great was the number of sleeping berths they contained, you would have supposed they were constructed for passengers only. [Sidenote: _Emigration Deprecated._] In this most modern city with most ancient name, there were many fine shops and good buildings, but little that was continuously good; unoccupied spaces, or spaces occupied only with poor wooden tenements, were everywhere interposed. The streets were generally totally uncared for. This unsightliness and neglect are to be set down to the past, and not to the present state of things. They are some of the legacies of slavery.