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.

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 “L 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.

“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.