rence where the dwellers in the temple itself have grown cold.

Compared with those of the British Isles, all the skies of the United
States are blue. In the North, this blue is clear, strong, bright; in
the South, a softness mingles with the brilliancy, and tempers it to a
beauty which is not surpassed. The sky over the cotton lands of South
Carolina is as soft as that of Tuscany; the blue above the silver
beaches of Florida melts as languorously as that above Capri's enchanted
shore. Gracias-a-Dios had this blue sky. Slumberous little coast hamlet
as it was, it had also its characteristics.

"Gracias a Dios!" Spanish sailors had said, three hundred years before,
when, after a great storm, despairing and exhausted, they discovered
this little harbor on the low, dangerous coast, and were able to enter
it--"Gracias a Dios!" "Thanks to God!" In the present day the name had
become a sort of shibboleth. To say Gracias a Dios in full, with the
correct Spanish pronunciation, showed that one was of the old Spanish
blood, a descendant of those families who dated from the glorious times
when his Most Catholic and Imperial Majesty, King of Spain, Defender of
the Church, always Victorious, always Invincible, had held sway on this
far shore. To say Gracias without the "a Dios," but still with more or
less imitation of the Spanish accent, proved that one belonged among the
older residents of the next degree of importance, that is, that one's
grandfather or great-grandfather had been among those English colonists
who had come out to Florida during the British occupation; or else that
he had been one of the planters from Georgia and the Carolinas who had
moved to the province during the same period. This last pronunciation
was also adopted by those among the later-coming residents who had an
interest in history, or who loved for their own sakes the melody of the
devout old names given by the first explorers--names now so rapidly
disappearing from bay and harbor, reef and key. But these three classes
were no longer all, there was another and more recent one, small and
unimportant as yet, but destined to grow. This new class counted within
its ranks at present the captains and crews of the northern schooners
that were beginning to come into that port for lumber; the agents of
land-companies looking after titles and the old Spanish grants;
speculators with plans in their pockets for railways, with plans in
their pockets for canals, with