During the next year--1798--the Assembly passed an act allowing the formation of fire companies by any number of persons exceeding forty, who should record their names and subscriptions in the County Court. These companies were allowed to form their own regulations, impose fines to the amount of £5, and collect the same by suit before a single magistrate, which fines were to be applied to the purposes of their institution. Previous to this time there had existed no impediment to the clandestine importation of goods by the way of Louisville; New Orleans being in possession of a foreign nation. In 1799, therefore, Congress passed an act by which Louisville was declared to be a port of entry, and a collector was established at this point. The history of Louisville has thus been brought up to a period when it occupied a deservedly prominent position among western towns. Nature had fitted it to take the first rank, and its rapid improvement demonstrated its power and capacity to assume that position. Thirty years before the time of which we are now writing, the compass of the white man for the first time broke the soil of Kentucky; the spot whereon this great city now rests was a trackless wilderness. The smooth waters of the broad Ohio mirrored in their bosom only the dark branches of the waving forest. The axe of the woodman had not yet awakened the echoes of the grove. The deer, the bear and the buffalo by day, and the wolf and the panther by night were the only inhabitants of the spot. Less than thirty years elapsed and the wand of the magician had changed the scene. The forest had been felled, the trowel of the builder had been wielded, the streets and alleys of a civilized town occupied the spot where the deer had sported in frolic play, and hundreds of merry voices shouted where only the howl of the wolf had been heard. That a civilized town with a population of eight hundred souls, governed by wise laws, possessing the usages of society, enjoying the luxuries of life and moving onward in its daily walk with the calm stability of its fellows, the growth of a century; that such a town should exist where less than thirty years before the beast and the savage had held undisputed sway, is surely an evidence of progress to which no other country in the world can find a parallel. It is a fact before which the wild romance of the Slave of Lamp almost ceases to be fiction. Louisville having now arrived at an importance of its own, separate and apart from the State, the remainder of this history will be more strictly confined to matters of a purely local character. And beginning a new chapter with a new century, the rest of these annals will be as rapidly and strictly detailed as justice to the claims of each event will allow. CHAPTER IV.