of the hills.

Whatever its geological origin, this soil has some very strange
characteristics. In composition it is neither stone nor sand, but a
cross between the two--brown and brittle. One can easily crush it to
dust in one's hand, in which form it has about the consistency of talcum
powder, and it may be added that when this brown powder is seized by the
winds and whirled about, Vicksburg becomes one of the most mercilessly
dusty cities on this earth.

On exposed slopes the marl washes very badly, forming great caving
gullies, but, curiously enough, where it is exposed perpendicularly it
does not wash, but slicks over on the outside, and stands almost as well
as soft sandstone, although you can readily dig into it with your
fingers.

Many of the highways leading in and out of the city pass between tall
walls of this peculiar soil, through deep cuts which a visitor might
naturally take for the result of careful grading by the road builders;
but Marse Harris Dickson tells me that the cuts are entirely the result
of erosion wrought by a hundred years of wheeled traffic.

So far as I know there is but one man who has witnessed this phenomenon
without being impressed. That man is Samuel Merwin. Merwin went down and
visited Marse Harris in Vicksburg, and saw all the sights. He was polite
about the battlefield, and the river, and the negro stories, and
everything else, until Marse Harris showed him how the highways had
eroded through the hills. That did not seem to impress him at all.
Moreover, instead of being tactful, he started telling about his trip to
China. In China, he said, there were similar formations, but, as the
civilization of China was much older than that of Vicksburg (fancy his
having said a thing like that!) the gorges over there had eroded to a
much greater extent. He said he had seen them three hundred feet deep.

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 do