home, with the ice perfection—"a perfect glare"—and the fun at its height. This was before the day of "rockers," of which I had a pair later,—and a proud boy I was. Pretty treacherous we found them to start with, or rather to stop with; but for better or worse we got the hang of their peculiarities before our skulls were irreparably broken.
Skating then was like whist-playing now,—an endless study. You thought you were fairly good at it till a new boy came along and showed you tricks such as you had never dreamed of; just as you thought, perhaps, that you could play whist till you sat opposite a man who asked, in a tone between bewilderment and asperity, why on earth you led him a heart at a certain critical stage, or why in the name of common sense you did n't know that the ten of clubs was on your left. Art is long. It was true then, as it is now. But what matter? We skated for fun, as we did everything else (out of school), except to shovel paths and saw wood. Those things were work. And work was longer even than art. Work was
