of course, classified for black and white; mixed schools having been nowhere attempted, or, indeed, demanded. The Industrial University at Fayetteville is to be a powerful institution, and the Judsonian University, located at Judsonia in White County, is one of the hopes of the future. Schools have been organized and maintained for a number of years in Fort Smith, Pine Bluffs, Helena, Arkadelphia, Dardanelle and Camden, and have been well attended by both white and black children. The State Superintendent could not inform me how many schools were in operation in the community; inasmuch as he had to operate with only the semi-annual apportionment of $55,000 in State scrip, worth forty cents on the dollar, he could not make much new effort. He admitted that but little progress in education had as yet been made in the remote parts of Arkansas; the thinly settled character of the region preventing neighborhood schools.

The vexed condition of politics in the State since the war has greatly hindered its development. People complained a good deal of the manner in which the Arkansas Central (narrow gauge) Railroad scheme was conducted. This road is now in operation from Helena to Clarendon, and is eventually to be completed to Little Rock. It traverses one of the best cotton producing regions in the South. Its completion is hindered by the anomalous condition of affairs in the State, and by the various accusations brought against its builders as to the manner in which they obtained the money to build it with. The Little Rock, Pine Bluff and New Orleans road now runs from Chicot to Pine Bluff, and will this year reach Little Rock. The Mississippi, Ouachita and Red River road is intended to run across the State from Chicot, on the Mississippi, to Texarcana, on the Red River. The Ouachita Valley road extends from Arkadelphia to Camden, and thence will connect with Monroe in Louisiana. Camden is one of the largest towns in Southern Arkansas, in the heart of a fine cotton-growing section. It will be seen that as soon as these projected lines are completed, Arkansas will be very thoroughly traversed by roads, and, with her splendid river highways, will find no difficulty in annually sending an early crop to Memphis and New Orleans. Steamers can reach Camden from New Orleans, coming up the Red and Ouachita rivers, and

thousands of bales of cotton annually go to New Orleans that way. But these facilities for communication cannot enrich the State so long as an appeal to arms by a discontented faction may at any time overthrow law, destroy order, and turn. towns into camps. There seem to have been, since the close of the war, the most bitter struggles between the different factions, sometimes resulting in bloodshed, and always in a paralysis of the State's vitality for some time after each combat. The partisans in a State where the use of arms is so common as it is in Arkansas are, of course, violent and vindictive, and a good many lives are wasted in useless struggling to prevent those sudden changes in party sentiment which are inevitable. When Governor Clayton was elected to the United States Senatorship, he was seemingly unwilling to allow his successor to take his office, for fear that he might change the course of the party. So, recently, the Republican governor now in office, having inaugurated his course by promising something like an honest administration, and by gathering around him. the more reputable of the old Conservatives,-in other words, by bringing politics, to a certain extent, back to their normal condition, and not controlling the intelligent property owners by ignorant and incompetent office-holders, was temporarily ousted by the beaten candidate, who brought a formidable army at his back, expelled the rightful governor, Mr. Baxter, and opened the way to a series of arrests and counter-arrests, which would have been laughable had they not been so disgusting to any one possessing a high ideal of Republican government. It required the interference of the Federal Government to secure the reinstatement of Gov. Baxter, and the would-be usurper, who had mustered at his back a Falstaffian army of idle and worthless fellows, retired only when the proclamation of the President warned him to do so. The reëstablishment of law and order was followed by a popular vote on the question of holding a new constitutional convention. The election occurred in July, and the people of the State affirmed, by more than seventy thousand majority, their desire for a convention. Several important amendments to the constitution will, doubtless, be made.

Taxes in the State are now nearly six per cent. The vicious system of issuing State warrants is pursued in Arkansas as in

Louisiana, and with the same disastrous results. A stern reign of law and order for four years would fill Arkansas with immigrants; but a coup d'état every four years will not be very reassuring. The legislature should enact a law forbidding the bearing of arms, and should enforce it, if possible. Murder is considered altogether too trivial an offence in Arkansas. I walked through the penitentiary at Little Rock, and saw a large number of white and black criminals who were serving life, or long term, sentences for homicide. A brace of negroes working at the prison forge were murderers; an old man, peacefully toiling at a carpenter's bench, was a murderer; a young negro, hewing a log, was a murderer; and in a dark cell, a murderer, stretched on his iron bedstead, was sleeping off the terrors which had partially subsided with the reprieve just sent him. The governor had fifteen proclamations, offering rewards for murderers, flying about the State at the date of my visit. The day before I left Little Rock, however, a desperado was hung in the neighboring town of Clarksville, and it was thought that the execution would have a salutary effect on the lawless element.

The resources of Arkansas are, like those of all the other southern and south-western states, as yet but little drawn upon by the resident population; and they are immense. Arkansas contains twelve thousand square miles of coal,* and a valuable coal basin is situated along both sides of the Arkansas

*Testimony of the State Geologist.

| river. In Sebastian county there are veins of coal six feet thick. A lead belt extends diagonally across the State; the lead and silver mines in Sevier county promise much. Clay, kaolin, gypsum, copper and zinc are found in profusion; manganese, ochre and paint earths are to be had in many counties; and there are vast quarries of slate, whetstone, limestone, and marble. Iron ore has been discovered at various points; but the coal stores are the great treasure, and must some time enrich the State.

The St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad has brought the Hot Springs, that famous Bethesda of the rheumatic and scrofulous unfortunate, within convenient distance of a Pullman Palace car. The staging is now eighteen instead of eightyfive miles to the Bad-Gastein of America, which lies in a wild mountainous region. The hot springs issue from the western slope of a spur of the Ozark range, about fourteen hundred feet above the sea level. There are now nearly sixty of these springs, new ones appearing annually. Their temperature varies from 95° to 150 Fahrenheit, and they discharge something like three hundred gallons per minute. Thousands of discouraged pilgrims flock to Hot Springs yearly, and return much recovered; while those who do not achieve a cure experience great relief. The town lies in a valley which follows the Hot Spring Creek, and is very well supplied with hotels and neat but inexpensive residences. I did not penetrate to the springs, but heard very powerful testimony in

current sweeping round the tongue of land on which the towns of De Soto and Delta stand, and the ferries plying to the land

The forests of Arkansas offer the most stupendous chances for the development of State wealth. The yellow pine and cypress, the cedar, the cottonwood, the mulberry, the oaks, hickories, sumac, pecans, and ash, grow along the navigable streams, and can be easily borne to market on the bosoms of the great currents. There are still in the State eight millions of acres of land belonging to the United States, subject to homestead entry, and these are among the best in Arkansas. A decent home government, and the progress of education among the masses would enable the State to leap into as wonderful a growth as that achieved by Texas and Missouri. But there is a great deal to do before that prosperity can be achieved.

The journey along the Mississippi river from Napoleon, on the Arkansas shore, to Vicksburg, the largest town in the State of Mississippi, discloses naught save vast and gloomy stretches of forest and flat, of swamp and inlet, of broad current and green island, until Columbia, a pretty town on the Arkansas side, is passed. Below Columbia the banks of the river are lined with cotton plantations for more than one hundred and fifty miles.

Vicksburg, the tried and troubled hill city, her crumbling bluffs still filled with historic memorials of one of the most desperate sieges and defences of modern times, rises in quite imposing fashion from the Mississippi's banks, in a loop in the river made by a long delta, which at high water is nearly submerged. The bluffs run back. some distance to an elevated plateau. In the upper streets are many handsome residences. The Court House is located on the summit of a fine series of terraces; here and there a pretty church serves as a landmark; and the remains of the old fort from which "Whistling Dick," a famous Confederate gun, was wont to sing defiance to the Federals, are still visible on a lofty eminence. From the grass-grown ramparts one can see, in the distance, the canal projected by the Federals during the siege; can overlook the principal avenue,-Washington street, well lined with spacious shops and stores, and unhappily filled at all hours with lounging negroes; can see the broad

North Louisiana to Shreveport; can see the almost perpendicular streets scaling the bluff from the water-side, and masses of elevators and warehouses down by the river, where the white stately packets come and go. There is evidence of growth; neat houses are scattered on hill and in valley in every direction; yet the visitor will be told that money is scarce, that credit is poor, and that tradesmen are badly discouraged. The river is so intricate in its turnings that one is at first puzzled on seeing a steamboat passing, to know whether it is ascending or descending; at the end of the "loop," near the mouth of the Yazoo River, and at the point where Sherman made his entrance from the "Valley of Death," is the largest National cemetery in the country, in whose grassy banks repose the remains of sixteen thousand soldiers. The view from the slopes of the cemetery, reached by many a detour through dusty cuts in the hills, is too flat

current setting around it, the wide sweep away towards the bend, are all charming. The old Scotch gardener and sexton told me that twelve thousand of the graves were marked "unknown." The original design contemplated the planting of the grounds with trees bordering avenues intended to resemble the aisles and nave of a cathedral. This was impracticable; but oaks have been planted, and the graves are covered with flowering plants and shrubs. The section of Vicksburg between the cemetery and the town is not unlike the park of the Buttes Chaumont in Paris. Grapes grow wild in the adjacent valleys, and might readily be cultivated on the hillsides. A simple marble shaft in the cemetery is destined to commemorate the spot where Grant held his famous interview with Pemberton.

The municipal government of Vicksburg since the war has been in the hands of carpetbaggers, maintained in power by ignorant negroes; but at the election held in August of this year, the adventurers were driven out, and men of intelligence and honesty were placed in office by the white voters. Many white people who ordinarily vote the Republican ticket are said to have voted with the Democrats, simply because they were desirous of seeing the city government reformed. The negroes hold many offices in the surrounding country; they are the county clerks and other officers of importance. They will learn a good lesson from the recent defeat of their false guides.

Vicksburg has acquired a not altogether enviable notoriety as a town where shooting at sight is a popular method of vengeance, and shortly before my second visit there, three murders were committed by men who deemed it manly to take the law into their own hands. There is still rather too much of this baroarism remaining in Mississippi, and it has not always the excuse of intoxication to palliate it. The Vicksburg method is not the duel, but cold-blooded murder. The laws of the duello are pretty thoroughly expunged in Mississippi, although I was not a little amused to learn from Governor Ames that the people in those counties of the State bordering on Louisiana, which are ultra-Democratic, refused to aid the Governor and his authorities in securing duellists who steal out from New Orleans to fight on Mississippi soil, on the ground that the "d-d Yankees want to do away

with duelling so as to make their own heads safe." Mississippi is a sparsely settled State, and in some of the counties life is yet as rough as on the south-western frontier. But that people should encourage open and deliberate murder in a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants, where there is good society, and where churches and schools flourish, is monstrous !

Vicksburg was once the scene of a terrible popular vengeance, when a number of gamblers, who persisted in remaining in the town against the wishes of the citizens, showed fight, and having killed one or two townsmen, were themselves lynched, and buried among the bluffs. The town gets its name from one of the oldest and most highly respected families in Mississippi,— the Vicks,-whose family mansion stands on a handsome eminence in the town of today. Col. Vick, the present representative of the family, is a specimen of the noble-looking men grown in the Mississippi Valley-six feet four in stature, erect and stately, and possessed of the charming manner of the old school. The picture which our artist has given of him does justice only to the fine, manly face; it cannot reproduce the form and the manner. Mississippi raises noble men, and they were wonderful soldiers, showing pluck, persistence and grip.

Nineteen lines of steam-packets ply between New Orleans and Vicksburg, and from Vicksburg up the Yazoo River. The scene in the elevators at the river side, as in Memphis, is in the highest degree animated. Thousands of bales and barrels roll and tumble down the inclined plane to the boats, and the shouting is terrific.

The railroad from Vicksburg to Jackson, the Mississippi capital, runs through the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the war, crossing the Big Black River, and passing Edwards and other flourishing towns, set down betweeen charming forests and rich cotton fields.

Sailing on from Vicksburg through the submerged country was sorrowful work. Imminent disaster depressed every one. We passed into the great bend, or lake, where, on Hurricane Island, lie the plantations formerly owned by the Davis Brothers, famous for their wealth. The broad acres once known as the property of Jefferson Davis are now in the hands of his ex-slave, who, by the way, is said to be remarkable for thrift and intelligence.

Drifting past Grand Gulf, a pretty town lying on romantic hills, and passing a host of half drowned landings and woodyards, we arrived at Natchez one lovely March evening, when earth and heaven seemed bathed in a delicious warmth, and nothing was to be heard save the cry of the frogs in a marsh at the river side.

Natchez, like Vicksburg, lies on a line of bluffs which rear their bold heads imposingly from the water.

It is one

of the loveliest of Mississippi towns, and was once the home of immense wealth, as well as of much culture and refinement. He who sees only Natchez-under-the-Hill from the steamboat deck, gets an impression of a few prosaic houses huddled together not far from a wharf-boat, a road leading up a steep and high hill, and here and there masses of foliage. Let him wander ashore, and scale the cliff, and he will find himself in a quiet, unostentatious, beautifully shaded town, from which, so oppressive at first is the calm to one coming from the bustle of Northern towns, one almost fancies that

"Life and thought are gone away;"

but he finds cheeriest of people,-cheery too, under heavy misfortunes, and homes rich in refinement and half buried under the lustrous and voluptuous blossoms which the wonderful climate favors. Natchez has an impressive cathedral, a fine courthouse, a handsome Masonic temple, and hosts of pretty houses. You walk beneath the shade of the China tree and the water oak, the cedar and the laurimunda. Nowhere is there glare of sun on the pavement; nothing more clamorous than the galloping of a horse stirs the blood of the nine thousand inhabitants. In the suburbs, before the war, were great numbers of planters' residences-beautiful homes with colonnades and verandas, with rich drawing and dining rooms, furnished in heavy, antique style, and gardens modeled after the finest in Europe. Many of these have been destroyed, but we visited one

or

two whose owners have been fortunate enough to keep them. The lawns and gardens are luxurious; the wealth. of roses is inconceivable to him who has not seen such gardens as Brown's, in Natchez-under-the-Hill, and that of Mr.