men and cities first appeared upon its banks, was for once circumvented.  This is but one item from the record of grotesque tricks wrought by changes in the river’s course:  a record of farms located at night on one side of the stream, and in the morning on the other; of large tracts of land transferred from State to State by a sudden switch of this treacherous fluid line of boundary; of river boats crashing by night into dry land where yesterday a deep stream flowed; of towns built up on river trade, utterly dependent upon the river, yet finding themselves suddenly deserted by it, like wives whose husbands disappear, leaving them withering, helpless, and in want.

Where the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, flows between tall bluffs it attains a grandeur which one expects in mighty streams, but that is not the part of the river which gets itself talked about in the newspapers and in Congress, nor is it the part of the river one involuntarily thinks of when the name Mississippi is mentioned.  The drama, the wonder, the mystery of the Mississippi are in the lower river:  the river of countless wooded islands, now standing high and dry, now buried to the tree tops in swirling torrents of muddy water; the river of black gnarled snags carried downstream to the Gulf with the speed of motor boats; the river whose craft sail on a level with the roofs of houses; the river of broken levees, of savage inundations.

The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately, placid, well-behaved blond wife.  She is conventional and correct.  You always know where to find her.  The lower river is a temperamental mistress.  At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at the next vivid and passionate.  Even when she is at her loveliest there is always the possibility of sudden fury:  of her rising in a rage, breaking the furniture, wrecking the house—­yes, and perhaps winding her wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.

Being the “Gibraltar of the river” (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come.  Turn your back upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the town piling up the hillside to the eastward.

The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water’s edge, are small warehouses, negro eating houses, dilapidated little steamship offices, and all manner of shacks in want of paint and repairs.  From the station Mulberry Street runs obliquely up the hillside to the south.  This street, which forms the main thoroughfare to the station, used to be occupied by wholesale houses, but has more lately been given over largely to a frankly and prominently exposed district of commercialized vice—­negro and white.  Not only is it at the very door of Vicksburg, but it parallels, and is but one block distant from, the city’s main street.