Various - Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

How many times we got lost among the lakes and "pot-holes," the fallen trees and thickets of Ekoniah Scrub, it would be tedious to relate. How many times we came down to the prairie-level, and, fearful to trust ourselves upon the treacherous, billowy green, were forced to "try back" for a new road along the hillside, it would be difficult to say. The county clerk's itinerary had ended here, and William Townsend proved to be less ubiquitous than we had been led to expect. Thus it was that night came down upon us one evening before we had reached a place of shelter—suddenly, in the thick scrub, not lingeringly, as in the long forest glades of the lake country. For an hour we pushed on, trusting now to Barney's sagacity, now to the pioneering abilities of Artist and Scribe, who marched in the van. Fireflies flitted about, their unusual brilliancy often cheating us into the fond hope that shelter was at hand. The ignes-fatui in the valley below often added to the deception, and after many disappointments we were about to spread our blankets upon the earth and prepare for a night's rest al fresco when we heard a distant cow-call. Clear and melodious as the far-off "Ranz des Vaches" it broke upon the stillness, gladdening all our hearts. How we answered it, how we hastened over logs and through thickets in the direction of answering voices and glancing lights—no ignes-fatui now—how we were met halfway by an entire family whom we had aroused, and with what astonishment we heard ourselves addressed by name,—can better be imagined than described. By the happiest of chances we had come upon the home of some people whom we had casually met upon the St. John's River only a few weeks before, and our dearest and oldest friends could not have welcomed us more cordially or have been more gladly met by us.

In the early morning we heard again, between sleeping and waking, the musical cow-call. It echoed among the hills and over the lakes: there were the tinkling of bells, the pattering of hoofs, the eager, impatient sounds of a herd of cattle glad of morning freedom. It was like a dream of Switzerland. And, hastening out, we found the dream but vivified by the intense purity of the air surcharged with ozone, the exquisite clearness of the outlines of the hills, the sparkling brightness of the lakes in the valley, the freshness of glory and beauty which overspread all like a world new made.

One of the great events of that day was a desperate fight between two chameleons in a low oak-scrub on the hilltop. The little creatures attacked each other with such fury, with such rapid changes of color from gray to green and from green to brown, with such unexpected mutations of shape from long and slender to short and squat, with such sudden dartings out and angry flamings of the transparent membrane beneath the throat, with such swift springs and flights and glancings to and fro, as were wonderful to see. It seemed as though both must succumb to the fierce scratchings and 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.

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 surrounding. Is a reverse process going on here, we wondered, from that we have seen in the prairies, and are these sheets of water to change slowly into marsh, and so to firm land again? There are a number of such lakes as these, and on the heights above one of the largest, which they have called Bethel, a family of Canadian emigrants have recently "taken up a homestead."

There was still another chain of prairie-lakes, the "Old Field Ponds," stretching north and south on our right, and as we wound around them, plashing now and again through the slowly-encroaching water, we had 'Gator-bone Pond upon our right. The loneliness of the scene was indescribable: for hours we had been winding in and out among the still lagoons or climbing and descending the ever-steeper, darker hills. Night was drawing on; stealthy mists came creeping grayly up from the endless Old Field Ponds; fireflies and glow-worms and will-o'-the-wisps danced and glowered amid the intense blackness; frogs croaked, mosquitos shrilled, owls hooted; Barney's usual deliberate progress became a snail's pace, which hinted plainly at blankets and the oat-sack,—when, all at once, a bonfire flamed up from a distant height, and the sagacious quadruped quickened his pace along the steep hill-road.

A very pandemonium of sounds saluted our ears as we emerged from the forest—lowings and roarings and shriekings of fighting cattle, wild hoots from hoarse masculine throats, the shrill tones of a woman's angry voice, the discordant notes of an accordion, the shuffle of heavy dancing feet. We had but happened upon a band of cow-hunters returning homeward with their spoils, and the fightings of their imprisoned cattle were only less frightful than their own wild orgies. If we had often before been reminded of Italian skies and of the freshness and brightness of Swiss mountain-air, now thoughts of the Black Forest, with all of weird or horrible that we had ever read of that storied country, rushed to our minds—robber-haunted mills, murderous inns, treacherous hosts, "terribly-strange beds." Not that we apprehended real danger, but to our unfranchised and infant minds the chills and fevers which mayhap lurked in the mist-clothed forest, or even a wandering "cat," seemed less to be dreaded than the wild bacchanals who surrounded us. We would fain have returned, but it was too late. Barney was already in the power of unseen hands, which had seized upon him in the darkness; an old virago had ordered us into the house; and when we had declined to partake of the relics of a feast which strewed the table, we were ignominiously consigned to a den of a lean-to opening upon the piazza. A "terribly-strange bed" indeed was the old four-poster, which swayed and shrieked at the slightest touch, and myriad the enemies which there lay in wait for our blood. We were not murdered, however, nor did our unseen foes—as had once been predicted by a Cracker friend— quite "eat us plum up, bodaciously alive." In the early morning we fled, though not until we had seen how beautiful a home the old plantation once had been. These were not Crackers among whom we had passed the night, but the "native and best." Not a fair specimen of this class, surely, but such as here and there, in the remoter corners of the South, are breeding such troubles as may well become a grave problem to the statesman—the legitimate outgrowth of the old régime. War-orphaned, untutored, unrestrained, contemning legitimate authority, spending the intervals of jail-life in wild revels and wilder crimes,—such were the men in whose ruined home we had passed the night.