A SKAITING PARTY

A Sliding Siute

A Skaiting Academy

Designed, Etched & Published by George Cruikshank No.r-1 1841

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THE ARTIFICIAL FLOOR FOR SKATING.

If our grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and great-grandmothers, and great-great-grandmothers, (who, depend upon it, were all very little people,) could only look down and see what is going on among us here below, how they would, as an Irish friend remarks, turn up their eyes! Those who were wont, while vegetaters in this world, to creep to bed with the lamb, for want of a light to sit up by, (before man "found out long-sixes,") must, upon peeping down now, be dazzled by the blaze of gas; yet what is gas compared to the Bude-light, already superseding it? Those who made their wills when they undertook a three-weeks journey from York to London, must be abundantly startled by our railroads; yet what is railway-travelling now to the velocity with which we are hereafter to move—when, seated on a cannon-ball, we shall be shot into a distant city in less time than it would take us to stop at home. But of all the wonders that must make them open their unsubstantial eyes, and rub their aerial spectacles, a Skating Assembly in a London drawing-room must assuredly take the lead. Balloons pilotable and walks under the Thames, iron ships and canals over carriage-ways,—these are mere common-places. Earth, air, fire, and water, are old-fashioned things. Artificial Ice is the new element that shall astonish the other four.

In America they are boasting the construction of a railroad to convey ice to Charlestown, for the supply of the West Indies! Very well; but that is real ice. England has done something more; she has established her independence of winter. She can do without frost altogether, and yet go on skating all the year round. She has discovered more than Parry did at the Pole; she has found out—Artificial Ice!