He was telling a tall Arkansan, with high-combed hair, self-conscious gloves, and very broad, clean-shaven lower jaw, how the peculiar formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, “the common dumping-ground and cesspool of the city, sir!”
Some of the students nodded convincedly to the speaker; some looked askance at the Arkansan, who put one forearm meditatively under his coat-tail; some looked through the window over the regions alluded to, and some only changed their pose and looked around for a mirror.
The Doctor spoke on. Several of his hearers were really interested in the then unusual subject, and listened intelligently as he pointed across the low plain at hundreds of acres of land that were nothing but a morass, partly filled in with the foulest refuse of a semi-tropical city, and beyond it where still lay the swamp, half cleared of its forest and festering in the sun—“every drop of its waters, and every inch of its mire,” said the Doctor, “saturated with the poisonous drainage of the town!”
“I happen,” interjected a young city student; but the others bent their ear to the Doctor, who continued:—
“Why, sir, were these regions compactly built on, like similar areas in cities confined to narrow sites, the mortality, with the climate we have, would be frightful.”
“I happen to know,” essayed the city student; but the Arkansan had made an interrogatory answer to the Doctor, that led him to add:—
“Why, yes; you see the houses here on these lands are little, flimsy, single ground-story affairs, loosely thrown together, and freely exposed to sun and air.”
“I hap—,” said the city student.
“And yet,” exclaimed the Doctor, “Malaria is king!”
He paused an instant for his hearers to take in the figure.