Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its play-days, there is no play like Skating.
To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel for the drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the _entrechats_ and _pirouettes_ of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.
We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under whose feet sprang roses; but Zero's heels and toes were armed with more precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid,--a hundred and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.
Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero's product, finer even than diamond, was filled--at the rate of a million to the square foot--with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or abridgment. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.
Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in Christendom.
On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.
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.