plans in their pockets (and sometimes
very little else) for draining the swamps and dredging the Everglades,
many of the schemes dependent upon aid from Congress, and mysteriously
connected with the new negro vote. In addition there were the first
projectors of health resorts, the first northern buyers of orange
groves: in short, the pioneers of that busy, practical American majority
which has no time for derivations, and does not care for history, and
which turns its imagination (for it has imagination) towards objects
more veracious than the pious old titles bestowed by an age and race
that murdered, and tortured, and reddened these fair waters with blood,
for sweet religion's sake. This new class called the place
Grashus--which was a horror to all the other inhabitants.

The descendants of the Spaniards, of the English colonists, of the
Georgia and Carolina planters--families much thinned out now in numbers
and estate, wearing for the most part old clothes, but old prides as
well--lived on in their old houses in Gracias and its neighborhood,
giving rather more importance perhaps to the past than to the present,
but excellent people, kind neighbors, generous and devoted friends. They
were also good Christians; on Sundays they all attended service in one
or the other of the two churches of Gracias, the Roman Catholic
cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the Episcopal church of St
Philip and St. James'. These two houses of worship stood side by side on
the plaza, only an old garden between them. St. Philip and St. James'
had a bell; but its Spanish neighbor had four, and not only that, but a
habit of ringing all four together, in a sort of quickstep, at noon on
Sundays, so that the Episcopal rector, in that land of open windows, was
obliged either to raise his voice to an unseemly pitch, or else to
preach for some minutes in dumb-show, which latter course he generally
adopted as the more decorous, mildly going back and giving the lost
sentences a second time, as though they had not been spoken, when the
clamor had ceased. This, however, was the only warfare between the two
churches. And it might have been intended, too, merely as a friendly
hint from the Angels to the Saints that the latter's sermons were too
long. The Episcopal rector, the Rev. Middleton Moore, had in truth ideas
somewhat behind his times: he had not yet learned that fifteen or at
most twenty minutes should include the utmost length of his weekly
p