merry crowd, until at last, breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the ice.
“He rayther beats Bosting,” says Captain Isaac Ambuster to Smith Wheelwright. “It’s so cold there that they can skate all the year round; but he beats them, all the same.”
The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of a skiff on the deck of his tug, and rocking it like a cradle, as he talked.
“Bosting’s always hard to beat in anything,” rejoined the ex-Chairman. “But if Bosting is to be beat, here’s the man to do it.”
And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I have said enough in behalf of a limited fraternity, the Skaters.
The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause of the Lovers, a more numerous body, and we will see whether True Love, which never makes “smooth running,” can help its progress by a skate-blade.
