As the Mississippi River flows south toward the Gulf of Mexico it passes other cities, but the biggest one is St. Louis, about half-way down. St. Louis—another saint—is near the two biggest branches of the Mississippi River—the Missouri, which comes in from the west, and the Ohio, which comes in from the east—both rivers named after States and both States named after the Indians. The Missouri is such a big branch that it is hard to tell whether it is a branch of the Mississippi or the Mississippi is a branch of it. Indeed, if you can find where the Missouri River begins you will see that from that point to the end of the Mississippi the river is much longer than the Mississippi itself—it is over 4,000 miles—so the Missouri- Mississippi together is the longest river

The Mississippi gets bigger and bigger as it gets more and more branches, and in the spring when the snow melts and the rain rains so hard and flows down into the branches, the river swells and swells until it finally bursts over its banks and floods the country. So, down where this is likely to happen, men have built banks along the river on each side, to hold the water in. These banks are called levees; but sometimes the river grows too big and strong even for these levees to hold it in, and the river breaks through or over the top and floods the country. If there happen to be any farms or houses or towns with people in them, the water washes houses away and drowns people and animals, and destroys thousands upon thousands of farms and other property.

The Mississippi near its end passes the city called New Orleans and at last flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The end of a river where it flows into the sea is called its mouth. I never knew why, because a mouth is where water flows in, not where it flows out. At any rate, the Mississippi has several mouths instead of one mouth, for the water in the river brings along with it so much mud that it settles right in the way of the river’s mouth and forms mud islands which the river has to go round, so the river blocks itself.