Chapter Twenty Three.
The Question.
There are many pleasures in life, and plenty of people to sing the praises of the sport most to their taste; but it is doubtful whether there is any manly pursuit which gives so much satisfaction to an adept in the art as skating.
I don’t mean skating upon the ornamental water of a park, elbowed here, run against there, crowded into a narrow limit, and abortively trying to cut figures upon a few square feet of dirty, trampled ice, full of holes, dotted with stones thrown on by mischievous urchins to try whether it will bear, and being so much unlike ice that it is hardly to be distinguished from the trampled banks; but skating over miles of clear black crystal, on open water, with the stars twinkling above like diamonds, the air perfectly still around, but roaring far on high, as Jack Frost and his satellites go hurrying on to mow down vegetation and fetter streams; when there is so much vitality in the air you breathe that fatigue is hardly felt, and when, though the glass registers so many degrees of frost, your pulses beat, your cheeks glow, and a faint dew upon your forehead beneath your cap tells you that you are thoroughly warm. How the blood dances through the veins! How the eyes sparkle! How tense is every nerve! How strong each muscle! The ice looks like steel. Your skates are steel, and your legs feel the same as stroke, whish! stroke, whish! stroke! stroke! stroke! stroke! away you go, gathering power, velocity, confidence, delight, at the unwonted exercise, till you feel as if you could go on for ever, and begin wishing that the whole world was ice, and human beings had been born with skates to their toes instead of nails.
Some such feelings as these pervaded the breasts of Dick Winthorpe and Tom Tallington as they glided along homeward on that night. Every now and then there was a sharp report, and a hissing splitting sound. Then another and another, for the ice was really too thin to bear them properly, and it undulated beneath their weight like the soft swell of the Atlantic in a calm.
“Sha’n’t go through, shall we?” said Tom, as there was a crack as loud as a pistol-shot.
“We should if we stopped,” said Dick. “Keep on and we shall be on fresh ice before it breaks.”
And so it seemed. Crack! crack! crack! But at every report and its following splitting the lads redoubled their exertions, and skimmed at a tremendous rate over the treacherous surface.