"No, I never had no trouble with Injuns. They was all gone to the Nation when I settled yere, but I see Billy Bow-legs onct, and Jumper, too. I was ago-in' through the woods, and I met a keert with three men in it. Two on 'em was kinder dark-lookin', but I never thort much of that till the man that was drivin' stopped and axed me ef I knowed who he had in behind. It was them two chiefs, sure 'nough: right good-lookin' fellers they was, too."
We had left the sandhills of the Ridge, and had reached the borders of the Scrub, but there was yet another of the new Northern settlements to visit. It lay a few miles beyond Geneva Lake, in the flat woods to the south of Santa Fé Lake, the largest and best known of the group.
Who does not know the dreary flat-woods villages of the South, with their decaying log cabins and hopelessly unfinished frame houses--with their white roads, ankle-deep in sand, wandering disconsolately among fallen trees and palmetto scrub and blackened stumps? Melrose is like them all, but with a difference. The decaying cabins, new two years ago, are deserted in favor of the great frame houses, which, unfinished indeed, have yet a determined air, as if they meant to be finished some day. The sandy roads are alive with long trains of heavy log-trucks or lighter freight-wagons; there are men actually buying things in the three stores; there is a school, with live children playing before the door; there are saw- and grist-mills buzzing noisily; there is a post-office, which connects us with the outer world as we receive our waiting letters; there is a stir of enterprise in the air which speaks quite plainly of Chicago and the Northern States, whence have come the colonists; there is talk of a railroad to the St. John's on the east, and of a canal which shall connect the lakes with one another and with the railway on the west; there is a really good hotel, where we spend the night in unanticipated luxury upon a breezy eminence overlooking the silver sheet of Santa Fé Lake, which stretches away for miles to the north and eastward.
[Illustration: ALDERMAN'S, ON GENEVA LAKE.]
The morrow was almost spent while we lingered in the neighborhood of the lake. The road makes a wide circuit to avoid its far-reaching arms and bays: only here and there are glimpses of the water seen through the trees and cart-tracks leading off to exquisite points of view upon its banks. We are in the flat woods again--palmetto-clumps under the pine trees, pitcher-plants and orchis in the low spots, violets and pinguicula beside the ditches, vetches and lupines and pawpaw and the trailing mimosa in the sand. The park-like character of the woods is gone. Still, there are here and there gentle undulations upon which the long lines of western sunlight slope away; the lake gleams silvery through the trees; the air is pure and sparkling as in high altitudes.