I have driven an open car 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 more than he feels the corresponding temperature at home--on somewhat the principle which caused the Italians who went with the Duke of the Abruzzi on his polar expedition to withstand cold more successfully than did the Scandinavians.
Of the southern summer I have no experience, but I have been repeatedly assured that certain of the southern beaches are nearly, if not quite, as comfortable in hot weather as are those of New Jersey or Long Island, while in numerous southern mountain retreats one may be fairly cool through the hot months--a fact which spells fortune for the hotel keepers of such high-perched resorts as Asheville, White Sulphur Springs, and the Hot Springs of Virginia, who have their houses full of Northerners in winter and Southerners in summer.
* * * * * The experience of arrival in Annapolis, delightful in any weather and at any time of year, gives one a satisfaction almost ecstatic after a cold, windy automobile ride such as we had suffered.

To ache for the shelter of almost any town, or any sort of building, and, with such yearnings, to arrive in this dreamy city, whose mild air seems to be compounded from fresh winds off a glittering blue sea, arrested by the barricade of ancient hospitable-looking houses, warmed by the glow of their sun-baked red brick, and freighted with a ghostly fragrance, as from the phantoms of the rose gardens of a century or two ago--to arrive, frigid and forlorn in such a haven, to drink a cup of tea in the old Paca house (now a hotel), is to experience heaven after purgatory.