alligator sleeping on a log; starry Lily-Pad; and Osceola’s Punch-bowl, deep enough, and none too large, to hold the potations of a Worthy; Twin Lakes, scarce divided by the island in their midst; Double Pond, low sunk in the green forest slope, a perfect circle bisected by a wooded ridge; Geneva Lake, dotted with islands and beautiful with shining orange-groves;—­always among the lawns and glades, the forest-slopes and aisles of pines, with sough of wind and song of bird, and fragrant wild perfumes.  Always with bright “bits” of life between the long, grand silences—­a group of men faring on foot across the pine level; a rosy, bareheaded girl—­the only girl in the place—­searching for calves in the dingle, who gave us flowers and told us the road with the sweet, lingering cadence of the South in her velvet voice; two men riding by turns the mule that bore their sacks of corn to mill; two boys carrying a great cross-cut saw along a sloping lakeside, a noble Newfoundland dog frisking beside them; the fleet bay horse and erect military figure of our host at Crystal Lake guiding us among the intricacies of the Lake Colony.  Always with sunny memories of happy hours—­gypsy dinners beside golden-watered “branch” or sapphire lake; the cheery half hour in the log house on the hill above the little grist-mill, with the bright young Philadelphians who have here cast in their lot; the abundant feast in the farm-house under the orange trees, and the “old-time” stories of the after-dinner hour; the pleasant days at Crystal Lake, where our first day’s drenching resulted so happily in a slight illness that detained us in that lovely spot, and showed us, in the new colony lately settled on this and the adjacent lakes, how refinement and cultivation, lending elegance to rude toil and harsh privation, may realize even Utopian dreams.

The great farm on Geneva Lake was the first old plantation which we had seen since leaving Kingsley’s, and this lies on the outskirts of Ekoniah Scrub, which has long been settled by native Floridians or Georgians.  “Hit ain’t a farmin’ kentry, above there on the sandhills,” said our host of the thrifty old farm on Lake Geneva.  “It’s fine for oranges an’ bananas, but the Scrub’s better for plantin’.  Talk about oranges!  Look a’ that tree afore you!  A sour tree hit were—­right smart big, too—­but four year ago I sawed it off near the ground and stuck in five buds.  That tree is done borne three craps a’ready—­fifteen oranges the second year from the bud, a hundred and fifty the third, and last year we picked eight hundred 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.