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.

[Illustration: SANTA FÉ LAKE.]

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