Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America by Richard Harding Davis

THE steamer _Breakwater_ lay at the end of a muddy fruit-wharf a mile down the levee.

She was listed to sail that morning for Central-American ports, and we were going with her in search of warm weather and other unusual things. When we left New York the streets were lined with frozen barricades of snow, upon which the new brooms of a still newer administration had made so little impression that people were using them as an excuse for being late for dinners; and at Washington, while the snow had disappeared, it was still bitterly cold. And now even as far south as New Orleans we were shivering in our great-coats, and the newspapers were telling of a man who, the night before, had been found frozen to death in the streets. It seemed as though we were to keep on going south, forever seeking warmth, only to find that Nature at every point of lower latitude had paid us the compliment of changing her season to spite us.