When the waters subside, and the people return, it is often difficult to find old landmarks. In one place huge trenches may be washed out; but away from the immediate vicinity of the crevasse the land is covered with mud, varying from a few inches to four or five feet in thickness--sufficient guarantee of amazing fertility, when the ground becomes dry enough to work. In the numerous little depressions in the surface are stagnant pools that linger for a month or two. The larger ones, if not before filled, are converted into ponds or marshes, which only thorough draining will destroy. The air is tainted by the hundreds of carcasses that are entangled in the heaps of drift. The hot dank soil, steaming under the summer sun, brings disease in the wake of the flood. Louisiana, from its character, is usually the principal sufferer: the Arkansas borders fare little better. All along the course of the stream the land is dotted with lakes and pools and marshy lands, created by former overflows. Along the lower portion of the river bayous or sloughs open from either bank, and meander lazily toward the gulf. As showing the character of the country may be mentioned the Little and St. Francis Rivers, which flow southward from southeast Missouri, nearly parallel to the Mississippi, and but forty miles from it at their furthest points. In flowing one hundred and twenty miles south they double and twist, expanding into sluggish bayous as broad as the Mississippi itself, or into shallow island-dotted lakes; and the total length of the numerous bends and whimsical curves of the main stream, St. Francis, is over two hundred miles. In like manner, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, is but fifty miles from the mouth of the sluggish sandy Arkansas as the crow flies; but to follow the windings of that stream the distance is nearly three times as great. The backwater of the Mississippi finds its way into these sluggish channels, and renders comparatively useless any levees on the banks of the great river near their mouths: and from the northern border of Arkansas to the gulf the old Father of Waters pursues a course as intricate in its windings as the St. Francis. It is asserted by many that the mouth of the stream was once perhaps not far below Memphis, and that all the land to the southward has been produced partly by slow upheaval of the sea-bottom and partly by the alluvial deposits of the river and the gradual extension of its delta, which now projects many miles into the gulf. This would account for the low and swampy character of the land in the entire region.