Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and schooners were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins, the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing their bar-rooms, regilding their bridal chambers, and enlarging their spittoon accommodations alow and aloft, for next summer. All the population was out on the ice, skating, sliding, sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart’s content.
One person out of every Dunderbunk family was of course at home, roasting Christmas turkey. The rest were already at high jinks on Zero’s Christmas present, when Wade and the men came down from the meeting.
Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He stamped to settle himself, and then flung off half a dozen circles on the right leg, half a dozen with the left, and the same with either leg backwards.
The ice, traced with these white peripheries, showed like a blackboard where a school has been chalking diagrams of Euclid, to point at with the “slow unyielding finger” of demonstration.
“Hurrah!” cries Wade, halting in front of the men, who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk, the tug “I. Ambuster,” were putting on their skates or watching him. “Hurrah! the skates are perfection! Are you ready. Bill?”
“Yes,” says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as Giotto’s autograph.
