August
noon
Saturday , April , 1852 . There was a fervor in the sky as of an August noon , although the clocks of the city would presently strike five . Dazzling white clouds , about to show the earliest flush of the sun 's decline , beamed down upon a turbid river harbor , where the water was deep so close inshore that the port 's unbroken mile of steamboat wharf nowhere stretched out into the boiling flood . Instead it merely lined the shore , the steamers packing in bow on with their noses to it , their sterns out in the stream , their fenders chafing each other 's lower guards . New Orleans was very proud of this scene .