THESE dry details are of importance in one particular.

They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi'soddest peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time.

If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder,it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average sectionof the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred milesstretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans,the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bithere and there at wide intervals. The two hundred-mile stretchfrom Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked,that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much.

The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deephorseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to getashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck,half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a coupleof hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow,at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again.

When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantationis back in the country, and therefore of inferior value,has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrowneck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it,and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit,the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling itsvalue), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation findsitself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse aroundit will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten milesof it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth.

Watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times,and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them,the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity tocut a ditch.

Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business.

Once there was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was onlyhalf a mile across, in its narrowest place. You could walk acrossthere in fifteen minutes; but if you made the journey around the capeon a raft, you traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing.

In 1722 the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed,and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles. In the same way itshortened itself twenty-five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699.

Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fiftyyears ago, I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight miles.

In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of thesethree cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles.

To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one hadto go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!--shortening of eighty-eightmiles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past,cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84;and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate,seventy-seven miles.

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