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 like islands in the grassy sea.
In the distance would be barren slopes of rich dark red and silvery
gray, swelling upward to the far dim mystery of pine woods and the blue
arch above.

We ate our dinner beside Lake Rosa, a circular basin of clearest water
rippling and dimpling under the soft breeze. Toward evening we found
the ford, which a paralytic old woman sitting in a sunny corner of a
farm-house piazza had indicated to us as "right pretty." Pretty it was,
indeed, as we came down to it through the most luxuriant of hummocks of
transparent-foliaged sweet-gums and shining-lea