EKONIAH SCRUB:  AMONG FLORIDA LAKES

[Illustration:  The ford.]

[Note:  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by J.B.  Lippincott & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.]

“And if you do get lost after that, it’s no great matter,” said the county clerk, folding up his map, “for then all you’ve got to do is to find William Townsend and inquire.”

He had been giving us the itinerary for our “cross-country” journey, by way of the Lakes, to Ekoniah Scrub.  How many of all the Florida tourists know where that is?  I wonder.  Or even what it is—­the strange amphibious land which goes on from year to year “developing”—­the solid ground into marshy “parrairas,” the prairies into lakes, bright, sparkling sapphires which Nature is threading, one by one, year by year, upon her emerald chaplet of forest borderland?  How many of them all have guessed that close at hand, hidden away amid the shadows of the scrub-oaks, lies her laboratory, where any day they may steal in upon her at her work and catch a world a-making?

There are three individuals who know a little more about it now than they did a few weeks since—­three, or shall we not rather say four?  For who shall say that Barney gained less from the excursion than the Artist, the Scribe and the Small Boy who were his fellow-travellers?  That Barney became a party to the expedition in the character, so to speak, of a lay-brother, expected to perform the servile labor of the establishment while his superiors were worshipping at Nature’s shrines, in nowise detracted from his improvement of the bright spring holiday.  It was, indeed, upon the Small Boy who beat the mule, rather than upon the mule that drew the wagon, that the fatigues of the expedition fell.  “He just glimpses around at me with his old eyeball,” says the Small Boy, exasperate, throwing away his broken cudgel, “and that’s all the good it does.”

We knew nothing more of Ekoniah when we set out upon our journey than that it was the old home of an Indian tribe in the long-ago days before primeval forest had given place to the second growth of “scrub,” and that it was a region unknown to the Northern tourist.  It lies to the south-west of Magnolia, our point of departure on the St. John’s River, but at first our route lay westerly, that it might include the lake-country of the Ridge.

“It’s a pretty kentry,” said a friendly “Cracker,” of whom, despite the county clerk’s itinerary, we were fain to ask the way within two hours after starting—­“a right pretty kentry, but it’s all alike.  You’ll be tired of it afore you’re done gone halfway.”