off her. Seedlin's? Anybody mought hev fruit seven year from the seed, but they must take care o' the trees to do it. Look a' them trees by the fence: eight year old, them is. Some of 'em bore the sixth year: every one on 'em is sot full now—full enough for young trees.

"Yes, that's right smart good orange-land up there in the sandhills. Forty year ago, when I kim yere, they was nothin' but wild critters in that lake kentry, as the Yankee folks calls it: all kind o' varmints they was—bears, tigers, panthers, cats and all kinds. Right smart huntin' they was, and 'tain't so bad now. They's rabbits and 'coons and 'possums, sure enough, and deer too; and—Cats? Why, cats is plenty, but they ain't no 'count.

"I niver hunted much myself, but I've heerd an old man tell—Higgins by name. Ef you could find him and could get him right, he'd tell you right smart o' stories about varmints, and Injuns too. I've heerd him tell how he went out with some puppies one time to larn 'em to hunt bear. He heerd one o' the puppies a-screechin', and kase he didn't want to lose him he run up. The screechin' come from a sort o' scrub, and he got clost up afore he see it was a she-bear and two cubs. The bear had the puppy, but when she see Higgins she dropped hit and made for him. Now, you know, a bear ain't like no varmint nor cow-beast; hit don't go 'round under the trees, but jest makes a road for itself over the scrub. Higgins hadn't no time to take aim, and ef he'd 'a missed he was gone, sure 'nough; so he jest drawred his knife, and when she riz up to clutch him he stuck her plum in the heart. Killed her, dead.

"No, I never had no trouble with Injuns. They was all gone to the Nation when I settled yere, but I see Billy Bow-legs onct, and Jumper, too. I was ago-in' through the woods, and I met a keert with three men in it. Two on 'em was kinder dark-lookin', but I never thort much of that till the man that was drivin' stopped and axed me ef I knowed who he had in behind. It was them two chiefs, sure 'nough: right good-lookin' fellers they was, too."

We had left the sandhills of the Ridge, and had reached the borders of the Scrub, but there was yet another of the new Northern settlements to visit. It lay a few miles beyond Geneva Lake, in the flat woods to the south of Santa Fé Lake, the largest and best known of the group.

Who does not know the dreary flat-woods villages of the South, with their decaying log cabins and hopelessly unfinished frame houses—with their white roads, ankle-deep in sand, wandering disconsolately among fallen trees and palmetto scrub and blackened stumps? Melrose is like them all, but with a difference. The decaying cabins, new two years ago, are deserted in favor of the great frame houses, which, unfinished indeed, have yet a determined air, as if they meant to be finished some day. The sandy roads are alive with long trains of heavy log-trucks or lighter freight-wagons; there are men actually buying things in the three stores; there is a school, with live children playing before the door; there are saw- and grist-mills buzzing noisily; there is a post-office, which connects us with the outer world as we receive our waiting letters; there is a stir of enterprise in the air which speaks quite plainly of Chicago and the Northern States, whence have come the colonists; there is talk of a railroad to the St. John's on the east, and of a canal which shall connect the lakes with one another and with the railway on the west; there is a really good hotel, where we spend the night in unanticipated luxury upon a breezy eminence overlooking the silver sheet of Santa Fé Lake, which stretches away for miles to the north and eastward.

[Illustration: ALDERMAN'S, ON GENEVA LAKE.]

The morrow was almost spent while we lingered in the neighborhood of the lake. The road makes a wide circuit to avoid its far-reaching arms and bays: only here and there are glimpses of the water seen through the trees and cart-tracks leading off to exquisite points of view upon its banks. We are in the flat woods again—palmetto-clumps under the pine trees, pitcher-plants and orchis in the low spots, violets and pinguicula beside the ditches, vetches and lupines and pawpaw and the trailing mimosa in the sand. The park-like character of the woods is gone. Still, there are here and there gentle undulations upon which the long lines of western sunlight slope away; the lake gleams silvery through the trees; the air is pure and sparkling as in high altitudes.

It was evening before we could leave the lakeside and plunge into the dense new growth which adds to the ancient name of Ekoniah the modern appellation of "Scrub." Amid its close-crowding thickets night came upon us speedily. How hospitably we were received in the bare new "homestead" of Parson H——; how generously our hosts relinquished their one "barred" bed and passed a night of horror exposed to the fury of myriad mosquitos, whose songs of triumph we heard from our own protected pillows; how basely Barney requited all this kindness by breaking into the corn-crib and "stuffing himself as full as a sausage," as the Small Boy reported,—may not here be dwelt upon.

The early morning was exquisite. Soft mists veiled all the glorious colors; great spider-webs, strung thick with diamonds, stretched from tree to tree; a little "pot-hole" pond of lilies exhaled sweet odors; the lark's ecstatic song thrilled down from upper air. There was a gentle hill before us, and halfway up a view to the right of a broad lake, with the log huts of a "settle_ment_" on the high bank. The sun has drunk up all the mists, and shines bright upon the soft gray satin of the girdled pine trees in the clearing; flowers are crowding everywhere—orange milkweed, purple phlox, creamy pawpaw, azure bluebells, spotted foxgloves, rose-tinted daisies, brown-eyed coreopsias and unknown flowers of palest blue. Butterflies flit noiselessly among them, and mocking-birds sing loud in the leafy screens above. A red-headed woodpecker taps upon a resounding tree and screams in exultation as he seizes his prey.

We skirted Viola Lake, cresting the high hill, and descending to a shaded valley where the lapping waters plashed upon the roadside: then mounted another hill, among thick clustering oaks and giant pines, to where three lakes are seen spreading broadly out upon a grassy plain between high wooded slopes. And these are Ekoniah! Twenty years ago a tiny rivulet, wandering through broad prairies; eight years later a wider stream, already beginning to encroach upon the grassy borderland; now a chain of ever-broadening lakes, already drawing near to the hills which frame in the widespread plain. Famous grazing-lands these were once, the favored haunts of cattle-drovers, more famous hunting-grounds in older days, before firm prairie had given place to watery savanna. There were Indian villages upon the heights above and bloody battles in the plains below. But who shall tell the story of those days? The Indians are gone; the cattle-drovers have followed them to the far South; the new settler of twenty years ago cared nothing for antiquities or for the legends of an older time. The dead past is buried: even the sonorous old Indian name has been softened down to Etonia: be it the happy lot of this chronicler to rescue it from oblivion!

The lakes of the lately-traversed "Lake Region," frequent as they had been, were as nothing to those of Ekoniah Scrub. The road rose and fell over a succession of low hills, each ascent gained discovering a new sheet of water to right, to left or before us, deep sunk among thick-clustering trees. At rare intervals the forest would fall away on either hand, opening up a wide view of cultivated fields, sweeping grandly down in long stripes of tender green to the billowy verdure of the broad savanna, where silvery-sparkling lakes lay imbedded and great round "hummocks" of dark trees uprose