It is the young lady who interprets literally the Scotch invitation “come into the fire,” and who spoils the backs of library novels by holding them too near the comfortable hearth, she it is who suffers from the ignoble and unbecoming liberties that winter takes with the human countenance.  Happier and wiser is she who studies the always living and popular Dutch roll rather than the Grecian bend, and who blooms with continual health and good temper.  Our changeful climate affords so few opportunities of learning to skate, that it is really extraordinary to find so much skill, and to see feats so difficult and graceful.  In Canada, where frost is a certainty, and where the covered “rinks” make skating an indoor sport, it is not odd that great perfection should be attained.  But as fast as Canadians bring over a new figure or a new trick it is picked up, and critics may dispute as to whether the bold and dashing style of the English school of skaters is not preferable to the careful and smooth, but somewhat pretty and niggling manner of the colonists.  Our skating stands to the Canadian fashion somewhat as French does to English etching.  We have the dash and the chic with skates which Frenchmen show with the etching-needle, and the Canadian, on the other hand, is apt to decline into the mere prettiness which is the fault of English etchers.

Skating has been, within the last few years, a very progressive art.  There was a time when mere speed, and the grace of speed, satisfied most amateurs.  The ideal spot for skating in those days must have been the lakes where Wordsworth used to listen to the echoes replying from the cold and moonlit hills, or such a frozen river as that on which the American skater was pursued by wolves.  No doubt such scenes have still their rare charm, and few expeditions are more attractive than a moonlight exploration of a winding river.  But it is seldom that our frosts make such tours practicable, whereas almost every winter it is possible to skate with safety, at least on shallow ponds, or on places like the ice-bound floods at Oxford.  Thus figure-skating, which needs but a surface of a few yards to each performer, has come into fashion, and it is hard to imagine any exercise more elegant, or one that requires more nerve.  The novice is theoretically aware that if he throws his body into certain unfamiliar postures, which are explained to him, the laws of gravitation and of the higher curves will cause him to complete a certain figure.  But how much courage and faith it requires to yield to these laws and let the frame swing round subject to the immutable rules of matter!  The temptation to stop half-way is almost irresistible, and then there occurs a complicated fall, which makes the petrified spectator ask where may be the skater’s body—­“which are legs, and which are arms?” Of all sports, skating has the best claim to adopt Danton’s motto, Toujours de l’audace—­the audacity meant being that of giving one’s self