The more Marse Harris tried to get him to say something a little bit complimentary about the Vicksburg erosions, the more Merwin boasted about China.  He declared that the Vicksburg erosions didn’t amount to a hill of beans compared with what he could show Marse Harris if Marse Harris would go with him to a certain point on the banks of the Wa Choo, in the province of Lang Pang Si.

Evidently he harped on this until he touched not only his host’s local pride, but his pride of discovery.  Before that, Marse Harris had been content to stick around in Mississippi, with perhaps a little run down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or up to Dogtail to see a break in the levee, but after Merwin’s talk about China he began to grow restless, and it is generally said in Vicksburg that it was purely in order to have something to tell Merwin about, the next time he saw him, that he made his celebrated trip to the source of the Nile.  As for Merwin, he has never been invited back to Vicksburg, and it is to be observed that, even to this day, Marse Harris, by nature of a sunny disposition, shows signs of erosion of the spirit when China is mentioned.

It is apropos the battlefield that I mention the peculiarities of the soil.  Had the bare ground been exposed to the rains of a few years, the details of redoubts, trenches, gun positions, saps, and all other military works would have melted away.  Fortunately, however, there is a kind of tough, strong-rooted grass, called Bermuda grass, indigenous to that part of the country, and this grass quickly covered the battlefield, holding the soil together so effectually that all outlines are practically embalmed.  So, although those in charge of the park have contributed not a little to its preservation—­putting old guns in their former places, perpetuating saps with concrete work, and placing white markers on the hillsides, to show how far up those hillsides the assaulting Union troops made their way in various historic charges—­it is due most of all to Nature that the Vicksburg battlefield so well explains itself.

Could Grant and Pemberton look to-day upon the hills and valleys where surged their six weeks’ struggle for possession of the city, I doubt that they would find any important landmark wanting, and it is certain that they could not say, as Wellington did when he revisited Waterloo:  “They have spoiled my battlefield!”

Besides the old guns and the markers, the field is dotted over with observation towers and all manner of memorials.  Of the latter, the marble pantheon erected by the State of Illinois, and the beautiful marble and bronze memorial structure of the State of Iowa, are probably the finest.  The marble column erected by Wisconsin carries at its summit a great bronze effigy of “Old Abe,” the famous eagle, mascot of the Wisconsin troops.  Guides to the battlefield are prone to relate to visitors—­especially, I suspect, those whose accents betray a Northern origin—­how “Old Abe,” the bird of battle, went home and disgraced himself, after the war, by his ungentlemanly action in laying a setting of eggs.