will be straddling the ridgepoles of their cabins, shouting at every passing motor boat or skiff..

A month, and the young corn and cane, the ploughed but yet unplanted cotton fields and the little truck farms a hundred miles away will be under water while the carcasses of hundreds of stock furnish roosts for myriad buzzards; for myriad buzzards; while the white landowners are accepting the hospitality of friends in a neighboring city, and the negro tenants are living on Government rations in a cotton compress which serves as a refugee camp.

Floods in the lower Mississippi Valley caused a loss of $100,000,000 this spring, it is conservatively estimated. Five important crevasses in the main levees of the Mississippi River, three breaks in the Atchafalaya, three minor breaks in the Mississippi did the damage. One hundred millions is an estimate, but it has no solid basis. No one knows what the crops in the overflowed area might have been-they might have been bumper yields, and they might have been nipped by frost or curtailed by drought. It is almost impossible to compute the number of farm animals drowned, the houses destroyed or damaged, the fences swept away, the fields denuded of soil and cov

ered with sand. It is impossible to reckon how much some plantations may have been enriched by soil deposits.

At least 2,500,000 acres were under water in Louisiana, including a score of small towns. This is close to one-eleventh the area of the State. The overflow in the upper Mississippi Delta, that famous cotton-growing region, and in Arkansas, brought the total above 3,000,000 acres. At Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and a dozen smaller points, over 200,000 refugees, the big majority negroes, were fed by the Government and clothed and housed by the States and by private charity.

It was the highest water the Valley has ever known. Extension of the levee system tends to increase floods each year, for the natural reservoirs are cut off. Denudation of the forests acts in the same way, for a forest, too, is a natural reservoir for rainfall. Perhaps never before was the Mississippi called upon to carry the "peak of the load" of the floods in the Ohio, the Missouri, the

PHOTO, UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, N. Y.

THE OVERFLOWED TERRITORY ALONG THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI THE PAST SPRING.

The shaded portions indicate, the submerged areas. It is estimated that nearly five million acres in Arkansas. Mississippi and Louisiana were flooded.

Red, the Arkansas, and a dozen minor streams all at once. The gauges on the Mississippi began climbing early, and kept climbing, late until they had exceeded all previous records of the United States Weather Bureau, in some cases by more than two feet.

The first break in the lower river was at Panther Forest, Ark. Then came the crevasse at Salem Landing, La. The water from these two spread downward until it narrowed between the low range

A SMALL TOWN AFLOAT IN LOUISIANA. Two hundred people in this street alone were obliged to camp out of doors.

of hills, the Mississippi River levees and the levees of the Red, converging at the peculiar bit of country where the Mississippi, the Red, the Old River and the Atchafalaya are united. This is the critical location, and levee engineers made a hard fight, but lost, and the great levee at Torras gave way, by far the most disastrous crevasse of the present flood. Meanwhile, the levee at Beulah, Miss., on the east-left-bank broke, flooding the upper Delta, which includes Sharkey, Issaquena, Bolivar and Washington counties.

Water from the Torras break spread over a vast area, and the break itself widened to a gateway for the roaring waters more than half a mile wide. Still the gauges below climbed, and at last, the levee at Hymelia plantation, about forty miles above New Orleans, but on the opposite, the right bank, gave way.

There were minor breaks. At Angola, La., the state penitentiary farm was flooded. Bayou Sara, La., was inundated, and a small break near the Gulf did a little damage. A populous trucking and cane region in Avoyelles parish was flooded by a break in the levees protecting Bayou des Glaizes. Three crevasses in the Atchafalaya River levee system, above and below Melville, La., inundated that town, and a large surrounding area, much of which was swamp. This prac

been studied for about two hundred years, for Le Blond de la Tour, the French engineer, built the first levee, a mile long, in front of the infant city of New Orleans in 1717. Now there are close to 300,000,000 cubic yards of them, and except where the mouths of tributaries or natural elevations preclude their necessity they extend on both sides of the stream from Cape Girardeau, Mo., to the Gulf, 1,039 miles.

Sixteen feet is a good average height, with an eight-foot crown, and a fortyeight foot base. The proportion of three to one is kept, so that the MorganzaLa.,-levee, the greatest dike in the world outside of Holland, is thirty-five feet high and more than one hundred feet wide at the base-a mountain range in miniature.

Of course, a levee has to be built from the dirt readily at hand, SO there are "buckshot" loam levees, Louisiana mud levees, and sandy levees, ranking in value in the order named. "Buckshot" is the material par excellence. It is tough; it packs well; it offers resistance

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to seepage; does not cave away, or suffer much from wave wash-but "buckshot" is not to be found everywhere.

One rule is invariable. Rock must not be used. Not a stone or a stick goes into a levee. These tend to make a levee porous, and a vertical filter is the last thing desired. Packed earth is the best, and for this reason, an old levee is better than a new. The earth packs and dries harder and harder with each succeeding summer, and grows a thick matting of sod, than which there is no better protection from wave wash. Every effort is made to grow grass on the levees.

Where a wide batture can be found, the situation is even more safe. The batture is the flat table of land which stretches out to the channel of the river, a flat stretch between the toe of the levee and the stream in low water. A batture is a silt deposit, but so old, often, that goodsized oaks and thick screens of willows grow upon it. The reason for the factor of safety a batture offers is almost self-evident. The current over the batture seldom is as swift as in midchannel,