It was evening before we could leave the lakeside and plunge into the dense new growth which adds to the ancient name of Ekoniah the modern appellation of "Scrub." Amid its close-crowding thickets night came upon us speedily. How hospitably we were received in the bare new "homestead" of Parson H----; how generously our hosts relinquished their one "barred" bed and passed a night of horror exposed to the fury of myriad mosquitos, whose songs of triumph we heard from our own protected pillows; how basely Barney requited all this kindness by breaking into the corn-crib and "stuffing himself as full as a sausage," as the Small Boy reported,--may not here be dwelt upon.
The early morning was exquisite. Soft mists veiled all the glorious colors; great spider-webs, strung thick with diamonds, stretched from tree to tree; a little "pot-hole" pond of lilies exhaled sweet odors; the lark's ecstatic song thrilled down from upper air. There was a gentle hill before us, and halfway up a view to the right of a broad lake, with the log huts of a "settle_ment_" on the high bank. The sun has drunk up all the mists, and shines bright upon the soft gray satin of the girdled pine trees in the clearing; flowers are crowding everywhere--orange milkweed, purple phlox, creamy pawpaw, azure bluebells, spotted foxgloves, rose-tinted daisies, brown-eyed coreopsias and unknown flowers of palest blue. Butterflies flit noiselessly among them, and mocking-birds sing loud in the leafy screens above. A red-headed woodpecker taps upon a resounding tree and screams in 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!