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.

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

“Now, then,” Wade said, “we 'll give Dunderbunk
a laugh, as we practised last night.”

They got under full headway, Wade backwards,
Bill forwards, holding hands. When they were
near enough to the merry throng out in the stream,
both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left
knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched
out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the
other man's leg. In this queer figure they rushed
through the laughing crowd.

Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a
grand show of

Skating as a Fine Art.

The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects
them to do their duty.

It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of
Fine Writing. Its eloquent motions must be seen.

To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a
Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will
never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable.
So much for yourself, the motive power.
And your machinery, — your smooth-bottomed rockers,
the same shape stem and stern, — this must be
as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it.

Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics
will say, “See! this athlete does his work as
Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels,
as Whittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the
dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as
Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as

[figure description] Page 155.[end figure description]

Seward, as keen as Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher;
he is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he
is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as
Steers's yacht, as Singer's sewing-machine, as Colt's
revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization.”
You wish to be so ranked among the people and
things that lead the age; — consider the qualities
you must have, and while you consider, keep your
eye on Richard Wade, for he has them all in perfection.

First, — of your physical qualities. You must
have lungs, not bellows; and an active heart, not
an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles.
You must have legs, not shanks. Their shape is
unimportant, except that they must not interfere at
the knee. You must have muscles, not flabbiness;
sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin
layer of flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you
will strike, if you tumble, — which, once for all be it
said, you must never do. You must be all momentum,
and no inertia. You must be one part grace,
one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manilla
hemp, and watch-spring. Your machine, your
body, must be thoroughly obedient. It must go
just so far and no farther. You have got to be as
unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically,
between forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your
aplomb must be as absolute as the pounce of a
falcon.

So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary
to be a Great Artist in Skating. See Wade,
how he shows them!

[figure description] Page 156.[end figure description]

Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the
first; — it always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm.
Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then
a fine æsthetic faculty, — in short, good taste.
Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent
to act in accordance with the laws of Art.
Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable.
That well-known sceptic, the King of
tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had
never seen ice and doubted even the existence of
solid water. Widdrington, after the Battle of
Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he
had no legs, — poor fellow!

But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin
in the elastic days of youth, when cold does not
sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do not
wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try
everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to
it; if you have good taste and a lively invention;
if you are a man, and not a lubber; — then, in fine,
you may become a Great Skater, just as with equal
power and equal pains you may put your grip on
any kind of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of
the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted
names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade's
achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible
rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a penpoint
cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and
a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams,
Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating also refuses

[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]

to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an
Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.

Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate,
its M. A., its F. S. D. (Doctor of Frantic
Skipping), its A. G. D. (Doctor of Airy Gliding),
its N. T. D. (Doctor of No Tumbles), and
finally its highest degree, U. P. (Unapproachable
Podographer).

Wade was U. P.

There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who
had passed their Little Go and could skate forward
and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps,
were through the Great Go; these could do outer
edge freely. A dozen had taken the Baccalaureate,
and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and
spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross
their feet, on the edge, forward and backward, and
shift edge on the same foot, and so were Magistri
Artis.

Wade, U. P., added to these an indefinite list
of combinations and fresh contrivances. He spun
spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He pivoted
on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings,
inner and outer edge, forward and back. He
skated on one foot better than the M. A.s could on
both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels;
he cut up shines like a sunbeam on a bender; he
swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased, like
a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not
muscle, moved him; he tore about in frenzies; his
pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg flapped like

[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]

a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped,
whirling backward as he went, over a platoon of
boys laid flat on the ice; — the last boy winced,
and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew
over, and the boy still holds together as well as
most boys. Besides this, he could write his name,
with a flourish at the end, like the rubrica of a
Spanish hidalgo. He could podograph any letter,
and multitudes of ingenious curlicues which might
pass for the alphabets of the unknown tongues.
He could not tumble.

It was Fine Art.

Bill Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion
hard. But Bill stopped just short of Fine Art, in
High Artisanship.

How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display!
How delighted the whole population was
to believe they possessed the best skater on the
North River! How they struggled to imitate!
How they tumbled, some on their backs, some on
their faces, some with dignity like the dying
Cæsar, some rebelliously like a cat thrown out of
a garret, some limp as an ancient acrobate! How
they laughed at themselves and at each other!

“It 's all in the new skates,” says Wade,
apologizing for his unapproachable power and
finish.

“It 's suthin' in the man,” says Smith Wheelwright.

“Now chase me, everybody,” said Wade.

And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the

[figure description] Page 159.[end figure description]

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.

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