Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1873 — A Frost at Memphis. [ARTICLE]

A Frost at Memphis.

The Memphis Appeal thusr describes the coining of the frost at Memphis: “While it. was yet twilight, and ere the dappled east had yet opened the gates of day to the rising sun, hastily-attired men and women, with semi-nude children in their arms, were out in the streets, breathing the precious air of the purifying frost. Here, stooping down, One gathered a handful of.glittering lioar-frost, Which, pure and beautiful, lay upon the earth, and, gazing on it with somewhat of the gladdening spirit with which the Israelite gathered the mauna in the desert of Ariibia, exclaimed: ‘O, God! we thank Thee for this blessing!’ Otherscanic and touched with reverential fingers the pure, cold messenger ot health, as if to satisfy themselves,' like the lialf-helievmg Thomas of old, that the savior of the city had not risen but descended from heaven, to save the people from the destroying angel of the pestilence. Groups of men and women moved from place to place, to prove by cumulative evidence that indeed it was frost, and pot some optical illusion; that the wislted-for guest had not merely confined its visitations to one locality, but enjoyed the freedom of the city. Here a pale face, once a handsome woman, with a tender babe at her breast, knelt down on the cold ground to thank God that the frost had come! Poor, stricken heart! she and her orphan bov were all that the pestilence had spared out of a once happy finqily. Strong men, bare-headed and hare-artncd, walked excitedly hither and thither, rejoicing* in the fact that a physician had come, to whose nostrums the whole faculty must yield precedence as the only true panacea for the terrible yellow fevur. Windows and doors were thrown open; Woolen and cotton garments were exposed to the disinfecting agency of the cold and rarefied air, and everywhere in the city, as well as in the vicinity of the inflected region, the enthusiasm was marked, if not ftervent fiM joyous.”