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. For there is no town that I know whose very house fronts hold out to the stranger that warm, old-fashioned welcome that Annapolis seems to give.
The Paca house, which as a hotel has acquired the name Carvel Hall, is the house that Winston Churchill had in mind as the Manners house, of his novel "Richard Carvel." A good idea of the house, as it was, may be obtained by visiting the Brice house, next door, for the two are almost twins. When Mr. Churchill was a cadet at Annapolis, before the modern part of the Carvel Hall hotel was built, there were the remains of terraced gardens back of the old mansion, stepping down to an old spring house, and a rivulet which flowed through the grounds was full of watercress. The book describes a party at the house and in these gardens. The Chase house on Maryland Avenue was the one Mr. Churchill thought of as the home of Lionel Carvel, and he described the view from upper windows of this house, over the Harwood house, across the way, to the Severn.