The upper river has a beauty which is like that of some lovely, stately,
placid, well-behaved blond wife. She is conventional and correct. You
always know where to find her. The lower river is a temperamental
mistress. At one moment she is all sweetness, smiles and playfulness; at
the next vivid and passionate. Even when she is at her loveliest there
is always the possibility of sudden fury: of her rising in a rage,
breaking the furniture, wrecking the house--yes, and perhaps winding her
wicked cold arms about you in a final destroying embrace.
Being the "Gibraltar of the river" (albeit a Gibraltar of clay and not
of rock), Vicksburg does not suffer when floods come. Turn your back
upon the river, as you stand on the platform of the Yazoo & Mississippi
railroad station, and you may gather at a glance an impression of the
town piling up the hillside to the eastward.
The first buildings, occupying the narrow shelf of land at the water's
edge, are small warehouses, negro eating houses, dilapidated little
steamship offices, and all manner of shacks in want of paint and
repairs. From the station Mulberry Street runs obliquely up the hillside
to the south. This street, which forms the main thoroughfare to the
station, used to be occupied by wholesale houses, but has more lately
been given over largely to a frankly and prominently exposed district of
commercialized vice--negro and white.
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