in the place--searching for calves in the dingle, who gave us flowers
and told us the road with the sweet, lingering cadence of the South in
her velvet voice; two men riding by turns the mule that bore their
sacks of corn to mill; two boys carrying a great cross-cut saw along a
sloping lakeside, a noble Newfoundland dog frisking beside them; the
fleet bay horse and erect military figure of our host at Crystal Lake
guiding us among the intricacies of the Lake Colony. Always with sunny
memories of happy hours--gypsy dinners beside golden-watered "branch"
or sapphire lake; the cheery half hour in the log house on the hill
above the little grist-mill, with the bright young Philadelphians who
have here cast in their lot; the abundant feast in the farm-house under
the orange trees, and the "old-time" stories of the after-dinner hour;
the pleasant days at Crystal Lake, where our first day's drenching
resulted so happily in a slight illness that detained us in that lovely
spot, and showed us, in the new colony lately settled on this and the
adjacent lakes, how refinement and cultivation, lending elegance to
rude toil and harsh privation, may realize even Utopian dreams.

The great farm on Geneva Lake was the first old plantation which we had
seen since leaving Kingsley's, and this lies on the outskirts of
Ekoniah Scrub, which has long been settled by native Floridians or
Georgians. "Hit ain't a farmin' kentry, above there on the sandhills,"
said our host of the thrifty old farm on Lake Geneva. "It's fine for
oranges an' bananas, but the Scrub's better for plantin'. Talk about
oranges! Look a' that tree afore you! A sour tree hit were--right smart
big, too--but four year ago I sawed it off near the ground and stuck in
five buds. That tree is done borne three craps a'ready--fifteen oranges
the second year from the bud, a hundred and fifty the third, and last
year we picked eight hundred off her. Seedlin's? Anybody mought hev
fruit seven year from the seed, but they must take care o' the trees to