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 Street, 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.