r sheet of Santa Fe 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