rehouses, 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.

Other streets, so steep as hardly to be passable, directly assault the
face of the hill, mounting abruptly to Washington Street, which runs on
a flat terrace at about the height of the top of the station roof, and
exposes to the view of the newly arrived traveler the unpainted wooden
backs of a number of frame buildings which, though they are but two or
three stories high in front, reach in some cases a height of five or six
stories at the rear, owing to the steepness of the hillside to which
they cling. The roof lines, side walls, windows, chimneys, galleries,
posts, and railings of these sad-looking structures are all
picturesquely out of plumb, and some idea of the general dilapidation
may be gathered from the fact that, one day, while my companion stood on
the station platform, drawing a picture of this scene, a brick chimney,
a portrait of which he had just completed, softly collapsed before our
eyes, for all the world like a sitter who, having held a pose too long,
faints from exhaustion.

A brief inspection of the life on the galleries of these foul old fire
traps reveals them as negro tenements; and, though they front on the
main street of Vicksburg, it should be explained that about here begins
the "nigger end" of Washington Street--the more prosperous portion of
the downtown section lying to the southward, where substantial brick
office buildings may be seen.

Between the ragged, bulging tenements above are occasional narrow gaps
through which are revealed cinematographic glimpses of street traffic;
and over the tenement roofs one catches sight of sundry other buildings,
these being of brick, and, though old, and in no way imposing, yet of a
more prosperous and self-respecting character than the nearer
structures.

Altogether, the scene, though it is one to delight an etcher, is not of
a character to inspire hope in the heart of a humanitarian, or an exper