[Illustration: THE SCAVENGERS OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA]

It is interesting to note, by the way, that this epidemic, with its
millions of dollars of loss to the city of New Orleans, might have been
averted at a comparatively small cost, had the city fathers possessed
the intelligence and foresight to adopt a plan devised by Dr. Quitman
Kohnke, the city health officer. New Orleans gets its drinking water
from private cisterns. Each of these is a breeding place for the
yellow-fever-bearing mosquito. Dr. Kohnke introduced a bill a year
before the epidemic, providing for the screening of all the cisterns, so
that the mosquitos might not spread abroad; and also for the destruction
by oil of the insects in the open pools. The total cost would hardly
have exceeded $200,000. But there was no yellow fever in the city then;
the public had recovered from its latest scare; and the bill was voted
down with derision. I suppose the saving of that $200,000 cost New
Orleans some forty or fifty million dollars in all.

Seldom does a Southern State discover yellow fever within its own
borders. It is always Mississippi that finds the infection in New
Orleans, and Louisiana that finds it in Galveston. This apparently
curious condition of affairs is explicable readily enough, on the ground
that no State wishes to discover the germ in its own veins, but is quite
willing, for commercial reasons, to point out the bacillus in the
system of its neighbor. In 1897 Texas was infected pretty widely with
yellow fever; but pressure on the boards of health kept them from
reporting it for what it was. In light cases they called it dengue or
breakbone fever. Now, dengue has this short-coming: that people do not
die of it. Disobliging sufferers from the alleged "dengue" began to fill
up the cemeteries, thereby embarrassing the local authorities, until one
of the health officers had a brilliant idea. "When they die," he said,
"we'll call it malarial fever." And as such it went upon the records.
Two recalcitrant members of the Galveston Health Board reported certain
extremely definite cases as yellow fever. They were forced to resign,
and the remainder of the Board passed resolutions declaring that there
was no yellow fever, there never had been any yellow fever, and there
never would be any yellow fever as long as they held their jobs--or
words to that effect. San Antonio also had the epidemic; so much of it
that the mail service was suspended; but noth