eet, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has
the look of a busy city street; yet on the same square with the hotel,
on the street below, nearer the river, is an unwholesome negro
settlement. So it is all over the city; the "white folks" live on the
hills, while the "niggers" inhabit the adjacent bottoms. Nor is that the
only sense in which the town is patched together. Some of the most
charming of the city's old homes are tucked away where the visitor is
not likely to see them without deliberate search. Such a place, for
example, is the old Klein house, standing amid lawns and old-fashioned
gardens, on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. This house was built
long before the railroad came to Vicksburg, cutting off its grounds from
the river. A patch in the paneling of the front door shows where a
cannon ball passed through at the time of the bombardment, and the ball
itself may still be seen embedded in the woodwork of one of the rooms
within.

And there are other patches. Near the old courthouse, which rears itself
so handsomely at the summit of a series of terraces leading up from the
street, are a number of old sand roads which must be to-day almost as
they were in the heyday of the river's glory, when the region in which
the courthouse stands was the principal part of the city--the days of
heavy drinking and gambling, dueling, slave markets, and steamboat
races. These streets are not the streets of a city, but of a small town.
So, too, where Adams Street crosses Grove, it has the appearance of a
country lane, the road represented by a pair of wheel tracks running
through the grass; but Cherry Street, only a block distant, is built up
with city houses and has a good asphalt pavement and a trolley line.

CHAPTER XLVII

THE BAFFLING MISSISSIPPI

As inevitably as water flows down the hills of Vicksburg to the river,
the visitor's thoughts flow down always to the great spectacular,
historic, mischievous, dominating stream.

Mark Twain, in that glorious book, "Life on the Mississippi," declared,
in speaking of the eternal problems of the Mississippi, that as there
are not enough citizens of Louisiana to take care of all the theories
about the river at the rate of one theory per individual, each citizen
has two theories. That is the case to-day as it was when Mark Twain was
a pilot. I have heard half a dozen prominent men, some of them
engineers, state their views as to what should be done. Each view seemed
s