clawings; and when at last one
got the entire head of his adversary in his mouth and proceeded
deliberately to chew it up, we thought that the last act in the tragedy
was at hand. The Small Boy made a stealthy step forward with a view to
a capture, when, presto! change! two chameleons with heads intact were
calmly gazing down upon us with that placid look of their kind which
seemed to assure us that fighting was the last act of which they were
capable.

That day, too, is memorable for the charming scenes it brought us,
impossible for the pencil to reproduce with all their sweet
accessories. We have found the ford at last, where the blue ribbon of
the stream lies across the white sand of our road. The prairie
stretches out broad and green with many circular islets of tree-mounds
in the ocean-like expanse. The winding road beyond the ford leads,
between cultivated fields on one side and the tree-bordered prairie on
the other, up to the low horizon, where soft white thunderheads are
heaped in the hazy blue. The tinkling of cow-bells comes sweetly over
the sea of grass; slow wavelets sob softly in the sedges of the stream;
fish glance through the water; a duck flies up on swiftly-whirring
wing. A great moss-draped live-oak leans over the stream, and the
perfume of the tender grapes which crown it floats toward us on the
air.

Again, after we have climbed the hill to Swan Lake, and have dined
beside Half-moon Pond, and have "laid our course," as the sailors say,
by our map and the sun, straight through the Scrub to visit Lake Ella,
we come out upon the heights above Lake Hutchinson. The dark greens of
the foreground soften into deep-blue shadows in the middle distance.
Lake Hutchinson sparkles, a vivid sapphire, against the distant
silvery-gray of Lake Geneva, while far away the low blue hills melt,
range behind range, into the pale-blue sky.

[Illustration: SANTA FE LAKE.]

Our faces were turned homeward, but there were yet many miles of the
Ekoniah country running to northward on the east of the Ridge, and
lakes and lakes and lakes among the scrub-clothed hills. A new feature
had become apparent in many of them: a low reef of marsh entirely
encircling the inner waters and separating them from a still outer
lagoon, reminding us, with a difference, of coral-reefs encircling
lakes in mid-ocean. The shores of these lakes were not marshy, but firm
and hard, like the lakes of the hilltops, with the same smooth
forest-slope