4	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.
over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject
to the laws of the State of Louisiana ! Such a thing, happening in
the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from
Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.
The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone : it is
always changing its habitat bodily—is always moving bodily sidewise.
At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used
to occupy. As a result, the original site of that settlement is not
now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the

LA  SALLE
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State of Mississippi. Nearly the whole of that one thousand three
hundred miles of old Mississippi River which La Salte floated down
in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now.
The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other
places.
Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at
the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds
fast enough in better protected regions higher up : for instance,
Prophet's Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land