was given him in the building now standing on the corner of Commerce and Tallapoosa Streets; and in the small hours "a large concourse of citizens escorted him through the darkness down to the landing, and bid him a hearty but mournful adieu amid torrents of tears."
Frontier life conduces to early maturity in cities as well as in men, and Montgomery was no exception to the rule. The hard knocks that produce self-reliance were not slow in coming. In spite of disastrous freshets and destructive epidemics, the population increased, and with its growth came a new and rougher element. An old newspaper suggests drily: "It requires no stretch of art to put rubbish before a shop door; to take down a ginger-*bread-maker's sign; to take the wheels from a lady's carriage and put them on a silversmith's shop; and make noise enough to disturb the slumbers of the sick by beating stirrups for triangles, and blowing conch-shells for French horns." Drunkenness and gambling increased, and the same paper soon had occasion to add: "This is the third, if not the fourth, attempt at homicide in this place within a few months." Such things were the first test of the city's
