. Every state-room had its couple of cozy clean
bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes
there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could
be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these
things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves
at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also
public towels, public combs, and public soap.

Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her in her
highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory
estate. Now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt,
and you have the Cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all
over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except
the steward's.

But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the
counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for
the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change; neither
has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any.

Chapter 39 Manufactures and Miscreants

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. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has
always been attractive. Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its
charms:

'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved