"No," he answered. "Not both. There wasn't time."
"Let's see the one you did."
"As a matter of fact," he returned, "I didn't do any. You know how it is. Sometimes a fellow feels like drawing—sometimes he doesn't. Somehow I didn't feel like it this morning."
With that he lifted the lapel of his coat and, bending his head downward, sniffed in a romantic manner at the sickeningly sweet flower in his buttonhole.
CHAPTER XLV
VICKSBURG OLD AND NEW
I should advise the traveler who is interested in cities not to enter Vicksburg by the Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad, which has a dingy little station in a sort of gulch, but by the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad—a branch of the Illinois Central—which skirts the river bank and flashes a large first impression of the city before the eyes of alighting passengers.
The station itself is a pretty brick colonial building, backed by a neat if tiny park maintained by the railroad company, and facing the levee (pronounce "lev-vy"), along which the tracks are laid. Beyond the tracks untidy landing places are scattered along the water front, with here and there a tall, awkward, stern-wheel river steamer tied up, looking rather like an old-fashioned New Jersey seacoast hotel, covered with porches and jimcrack carving, painted white, embellished with a cupola and a pair of tall, thin smokestacks, and set adrift in its old age to masquerade in maritime burlesque.
At other points along the bank are moored a heterogeneous assortment of shanty boats of an incredible and comic slouchiness. Some are nothing but rafts made of water-soaked logs, bearing tiny shacks knocked together out of driftwood and old patches of tin and canvas, but the larger ones have barges, or the hulks of old launches, as their foundation. These curious craft are moored in long lines to the half-submerged willow and cottonwood trees along the bank, or to stakes driven into the levee, or to the railroad ties, or to whatever objects, ashore, may be made fast an old frayed rope or a piece of telephone wire. Long, narrow planks, precariously propped, connect them with the river bank, so that the men, women, children, dogs, and barnyard creatures who inhabit them may pass to and fro. Some of the boats are the homes of negro families, some of whites. On some, negro fish markets are conducted, advertised by large catfish dangling from their posts and railings.