ernoon.

"Oh," returned one of the women, with the elaborate superiority of a
member of the class of idle rich, "we're just serenadin' 'round."

"Serenading," as she used the word, meant a promenade about the town.

Perhaps the happiness of the negro, here, has to do with the lazy life
of the river. The succulent catfish is easily obtainable for food, and
the wages of the roustabout--or "rouster," as he is called for
short--are good.

The rouster, in his red undershirt, with a bale hook hung in his belt,
is a figure to fascinate the eye. When he works--which is to say, when
he is out of funds--he works hard. He will swing a two-hundred-pound
sack to his back and do fancy steps as he marches with it up the springy
gangplank to the river steamer's deck, uttering now and then a strange,
barbaric snatch of song. He has no home, no family, no responsibilities.
An ignorant deck hand can earn from forty to one hundred dollars a
month. Pay him off at the end of the trip, let him get ashore with his
money, and he is gone. Without deck hands the steamer cannot move. For
many years there has been known to river captains a simple way out of
this difficulty. Pay the rousters off a few hours before the end of the
trip. Say there are twenty of them, and that each is given twenty
dollars. They clear a space on deck and begin shooting craps. No one
interferes. By the time the trip ends most of the money has passed into
the hands of four or five; the rest are "broke" and therefore remain at
work. Yet despite the ingenuity of those who have the negro labor
problem to contend with, Marse Harris tells me that there have been
times when the levee was lined with steamers, full-loaded, but unable to
depart for want of a crew. Not that there was any lack of roustabouts in
town, but that, money being plentiful, they would not work. In such
times perishable freight rots and is thrown overboard.

I am conscious of a tendency, in writing of Vicksburg, to dwell
continually upon the negro and the river for the reason that the two
form an enchanting background for the whole life of the place. This
should not, however, be taken to indicate that Vicksburg is not a city
of agreeable homes and pleasant society, or that its only
picturesqueness is to be found in the river and negro life.

The point is that Vicksburg is a patchwork city. The National Park
Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of
this size, and Washington Str