WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five.

It is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended its career as a river town.

Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the exiled town.
In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached Natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground.

Famous Natchez-under-the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect--judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby.

It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days.