WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream;but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it,like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There iscurrentless water--also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now.

You come down the river the other side of the island,then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water:

in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it.

Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg'stremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled bythe cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc.

The caves did good service during the six weeks'

bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863. They wereused by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children;not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion.

They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicularclay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill.

Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait;here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:--Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and threethousand non-combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiersand batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside;no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest,no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide newsto be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence ofsuch matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboatssmoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing towardthe town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed;no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no strugglingover bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty,corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound,rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion:

consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearingalong the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handfulof non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock inthe morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured trampof a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out ofhearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute:

all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery,the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streamingfrom soaring bomb-shells, and a rain of iron fragmentsdescends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets:

streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dimfigures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bedtoward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery,who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh.

The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the ironrain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops;silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues;by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder,and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing,bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures groupthemselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughtsof the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave;maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town,if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again,by-and-bye, when the war-tempest breaks forth once more.

There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not cometo know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly;insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of onewould be of interest to all?

Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almostanybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?

Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing itto the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburgerwho did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasonswhy it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship,it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's formerexperiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imaginationand memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strangeand stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all.

But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what then?

Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace.

The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse.

Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way,those people told it without fire, almost without interest.

A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquentfor ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the noveltyall out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground;the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of theirever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone.

What the man said was to this effect:--'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway.

We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and allof them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night,by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At firstwe used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards.

The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along.

When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards,when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a bigshell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece ofthe iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head.

Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again!

Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we couldtell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go undershelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk;and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was fromthe sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it.

If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;--uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we wenton talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!'

or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we wouldsee a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case,every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved.

Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking ascheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells;and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what ashell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that theysa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.

Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and endsof one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter.

Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unburstedshells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monumentin his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No ............