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 FE 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 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.