AMERICANS like to boast of the things of this country that are larger, longer, more valuable, or more wonderful than anything of the kind in the world. They have recited in school such a number of statements about the Mississippi river that the great stream has become one of the essential points of our nation's honor.

You may be able to make the average man believe that Washington' was not always as truthful in his youth as Weems in the cherry-tree story tried to make him; that Captain John Smith drew somewhat on his imagination when some sixteen years after the expedition into the woods he told the story of his rescue by Pocahontas; that perhaps, after all, we did not whip the entire British nation twice in open warfare — but it will be hard to make any native-born American admit that the Mississippi river is not the longest in the world.

He may listen to your argument in favor of the Nile or the Amazon, but he will tell you that he still thinks that if the Mississippi had been measured correctly at first, taking the source of the Missouri as the source of the Mississippi, we would have been the possessors of the longest river on earth.

And if that should seem a trifle weak he will at once tell you that the great river is more wonderful than all others because its source is several hundred feet nearer the center of the earth than its, mouth. In other words, the river flows up hill. The curvature of the earth is not the true arc of a circle from the equator to the poles, for the axis of the earth is shorter than its diameter at the equator by about twenty-six miles. It is thirteen miles less from the north pole to the center of the earth than from any point on the equator to the center. So the river flows towards the equator with an apparent fall as estimated from the sea-level, but with an actual rising away from the earth's center just as the sea rises round this shoulder of the earth.

So the Mississippi is a source of joy and boastful conversation to every citizen of the United States.

The Acadian settlers of Nova Scotia whose praises have been sung by Longfellow in his "Evangeline", were the earliest to reclaim land from the sea in America. Being weaker than those who used the ax to fell the giants of the forest primeval, they were more skillful with the spade.

They took advantage of the extremely high tides of the Bay of Fundy and its branches, and when the water was low threw up embankments which prevented the sea from covering part of the rich red mud flats before the village of Grand Pre.

At the time of their painful dispersion they had secured all the land between the original shore and the island which stood out in the basin of Minas.

Though they could not take these rich lands with them in their exile, many of them carried the knowledge of dike-building down to the lower courses of the Mississippi, and taught the rest of the Americans there how to get the fat lands of the river bottoms by means of levees.

When General Pakenham gave up his life and lost a fine British army to General Jackson after the treaty of peace had been signed in the War of 1812, his right rested on the bank of the Mississippi where there was a levee a little over five feet high.

This levee cut off the waters from .spreading when the freshet was on. It was sufficient at that time. Extensions of levee work cut off more and more of the bottom-lands from the spread of the high waters till now nearly four-fifths of the area over which the waters of the June freshet used to spread are protected by these structures.

The levees are not now the low banks of earth which once kept the waters back. The great mass of water that comes from the melting of snows in the Alleghenies and the Rockies must either spread out or pile up. Confining within less than a mile of width a surplus of water that formerly spread itself for a hundred miles makes it necessary for the water to rise and rush forward with greater violence.

Year by year the levees have crept up the sides of the great river, choking it into narrow walls. Year after year it has risen in its wrath and burst its bounds to destroy the cities and plantations which have been fattening in the mud of its alluvial flats. Every year the levees are put up higher, and as the works extend to the northward and more effectually close up the southern places of spreading out there is an average increase in the stage of high water and in velocity of the current. When it was allowed to wander over great stretches of country the water seemed in no hurry to get to the gulf, but now it goes tearing madly through its narrowed banks, and it has become a question with Congress which will take much deliberation and experiment as well as great financial outlay to solve.