That man is Samuel Merwin. Merwin went down and
visited Marse Harris in Vicksburg, and saw all the sights. He was polite
about the battlefield, and the river, and the negro stories, and
everything else, until Marse Harris showed him how the highways had
eroded through the hills. That did not seem to impress him at all.
Moreover, instead of being tactful, he started telling about his trip to
China. In China, he said, there were similar formations, but, as the
civilization of China was much older than that of Vicksburg (fancy his
having said a thing like that!) the gorges over there had eroded to a
much greater extent. He said he had seen them three hundred feet deep.
The more Marse Harris tried to get him to say something a little bit
complimentary about the Vicksburg erosions, the more Merwin boasted
about China. He declared that the Vicksburg erosions didn't amount to a
hill of beans compared with what he could show Marse Harris if Marse
Harris would go with him to a certain point on the banks of the Wa Choo,
in the province of Lang Pang Si.
Evidently he harped on this until he touched not only his host's local
pride, but his pride of discovery. Before that, Marse Harris had been
content to stick around in Mississippi, with perhaps a little run down
to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or up to Dogtail to see a break in the
levee, but after Merwin's talk about China he began to grow restless,
and it is generally said in Vicksburg that it was purely in order to
have something to tell Merwin about, the next time he saw him, that he
made his celebrated trip to the source of the Nile.
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