AN OX-CART IN SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI
This father is taking his family out too; it is a good large family, isn’t it? All these pickaninnies live in the house we see in the picture, way down in southern Mississippi. Before the Civil War the coloured people in Mississippi were slaves, but now they are free, and many of them live quite happily and contentedly in their little cabins. Numbers of them own small farms and grow cotton and corn, or sometimes sugar-cane, from which syrup and molasses are made.
Mississippi is one of the states where it is warm weather most of the year; the Gulf of Mexico is just south of it, and the breeze across the water is soft and mild. It rains a great deal in the southern part of the state, and there are many rivers, so the land is overflowed very often. Along the Mississippi River in some places banks called levees have been built, to keep the water in its place, but often after a heavy rain there is so much water in the river that the levees are broken, and then great damage is done. If the river did not sometimes carry off houses these overflows would not be so bad, for the water leaves a kind of mud on the fields, which makes things grow faster and better.
There are large numbers of trees in Mississippi: the holly that we use at Christmas time grows there, the fragrant magnolia, the persimmon with its queer puckery fruit, and many other varieties.
Rapid Transit in Southern Mississippi
From Stereograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York