The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature
and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880, by Various

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Title: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880

Author: Various

Release Date: January 30, 2005 [EBook #14842]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

OF

_POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE._

SEPTEMBER, 1880.

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 fr