The station itself is a pretty brick colonial building, backed by a neat if tiny park maintained by the railroad company, and facing the levee (pronounce “lev-vy"), along which the tracks are laid.  Beyond the tracks untidy landing places are scattered along the water front, with here and there a tall, awkward, stern-wheel river steamer tied up, looking rather like an old-fashioned New Jersey seacoast hotel, covered with porches and jimcrack carving, painted white, embellished with a cupola and a pair of tall, thin smokestacks, and set adrift in its old age to masquerade in maritime burlesque.

At other points along the bank are moored a heterogeneous assortment of shanty boats of an incredible and comic slouchiness.  Some are nothing but rafts made of water-soaked logs, bearing tiny shacks knocked together out of driftwood and old patches of tin and canvas, but the larger ones have barges, or the hulks of old launches, as their foundation.  These curious craft are moored in long lines to the half-submerged willow and cottonwood trees along the bank, or to stakes driven into the levee, or to the railroad ties, or to whatever objects, ashore, may be made fast an old frayed rope or a piece of telephone wire.  Long, narrow planks, precariously propped, connect them with the river bank, so that the men, women, children, dogs, and barnyard creatures who inhabit them may pass to and fro.  Some of the boats are the homes of negro families, some of whites.  On some, negro fish markets are conducted, advertised by large catfish dangling from their posts and railings.

Whether fishing for market, for personal use, or merely for the sake of having an occupation involving a minimum of effort, the residents of shanty boats—­particularly the negroes—­seem to spend most of their days seated in drowsy attitudes, with fish poles in their hands.  Their eyes fall shut, their heads nod in the sun, their lines lag in the muddy water; life is uneventful, pleasant, and warm.

When Porter’s mortar fleet lay in the river, off Vicksburg, bombarding the town, that river was the Mississippi, but though it looks the same to-day as it did then, it is not the Mississippi now, but the Yazoo River.  This comes about through one of those freakish changes of course for which the great stream has always been famous.

In the old days Vicksburg was situated upon one of the loops of a large letter “S” formed by the Mississippi, but in 1876 the river cut through a section of land and eliminated the loop upon which the town stood.  Fortunately, however, the Yazoo emptied into the Mississippi above Vicksburg, and it was found possible, by digging a canal, to divert the latter river from its course and lead its waters into the loop left dry by the whim of the greater stream.  Thus the river life, out of which Vicksburg was born, and without which the place would lose its character, was retained, and the wicked old Mississippi, which has played rough pranks on men and cities since