Cut-offs and Stephen
THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi’s oddest 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 section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two hundred-mile stretch from 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 deep horseshoe curves; so de
