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12 One frequently hears the severity of their winters urged as a reason for not travelling in the United States at that season of the year. My own experience of the unaturally severe winter of '67-'68 wd go some way towards proving that those who press this consideration do so under a misapprehension. It is possible that, by a singular sum of good luck, I may have always been at a warm place, when the weather was cold elsewhere, but it is literally true that during the winter I never once had occasion to put on an overcoat, excepting when I was in Canada at its breaking up. I left New York early in January, went through the south where I gathered ripe oranges from the trees on which they were hanging; ascended the Mississippi; crossed the Prairies & Plains to the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of which I found the thermometer at Denver standing at 70 degrees; recrossed the Prairies to Chicago; & during the whole of this time, whether on foot, or in a railway car, or on or in a coach, did not on any occasion find the weather disagreeable on account of the cold; though I frequently found it in railway cars, and in Hotels very much warmer than was agreeable. By what I have just said I do not mean that I never fell in with weather that was thermometrically cold, for I walked over the Mississippi on the ice at St Louis, but that it never felt disagreeably