d 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 Miss