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. So the first question we asked when we came over the side of the _Breakwater_ was not when we should first see land, but when we should reach warm weather. There were four of us, counting Charlwood, young Somerset’s servant. There was Henry Somers Somerset, who has travelled greater distances for a boy still under age than any other one of his much-travelled countrymen that I have ever met. He has covered as many miles in the last four years as would make five trips around the world, and he came with me for the fun of it, and in what proved the vain hope of big game. The third was Lloyd Griscom, of Philadelphia, and later of London, where he has been attaché at our embassy during the present administration. He had been ordered south by his doctor, and only joined us the day before we sailed. We sat shivering under the awning on the upper deck, and watched the levees drop away on either side as we pushed down the last ninety miles of the Mississippi River. Church spires and the roofs of houses showed from the low-lying grounds behind the dikes, and gave us the impression that we were riding on an elevated road. The great river steamers, with paddle-wheels astern and high double smoke-stacks, that were associated in our minds with pictures of the war and those in our school geographies, passed us, pouring out heavy volumes of black smoke, on their way to St. Louis, and on each bank we recognized, also from pictures, magnolia-trees and the ugly cotton-gins and the rows of negroes’ quarters like the men’s barracks in a fort.