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.