over the New England snows for miles in zero weather, and been warm by
comparison, because I was prepared.

My former erroneous ideas as to the southern climate may be shared by
others, and it is therefore well, perhaps, to enlarge a little bit upon
the subject. Never, except during a winter passed in a stone
tile-floored villa on the island of Capri, whither I went to escape the
cold, have I been so conscious of it, as during fall, winter, and spring
in the South.

In the hotels of the South one may keep warm in cold weather, but in
private homes it is not always possible to do so, for the popular
illusion that the "sunny South" is of a uniformly temperate climate in
the winter persists nowhere more violently than in the South itself.
Many a house in Virginia, let alone the other States farther down the
map, is without a furnace, and winter life in such houses, with their
ineffectual wood fires, is like life in a refrigerator tempered by the
glow of a safety match. As in Italy and Spain, so in the South it is
often warmer outdoors than in; more than once during my southern voyage
I was tempted to resume the habit, acquired in Capri, of wearing an
overcoat in the house and taking it off on going out into the sunshine.
True, in Capri we had roses blooming in the garden on Christmas Day, but
that circumstance, far from proving warmth, merely proved the hardiness
of roses. So, in the far South--excepting Florida and perhaps a strip of
the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama--the blooming of
flowers in the winter does not prove that "Palm Beach suits" and panama
hats invariably make a desirable uniform.

Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that because some southern winter
days are warm and others cold, a Northerner feels cold in the South