CHAPTER Twelve--Winter at Rivermouth.
"I guess we're going to have a regular old-fashioned snowstorm," said Captain Nutter, one bleak December morning, casting a peculiarly nautical glance skyward.
The Captain was always hazarding prophecies about the weather, which somehow never turned out according to his prediction.

The vanes on the church-steeples seemed to take fiendish pleasure in humiliating the dear old gentleman.

If he said it was going to be a clear day, a dense sea-fog was pretty certain to set in before noon.

Once he caused a protracted drought by assuring us every morning, for six consecutive weeks, that it would rain in a few hours.

But, sure enough, that afternoon it began snowing.
Now I had not seen a snow-storm since I was eighteen months old, and of course remembered nothing about it.