Once a week all Ottawa turned up at Rideau Hall to skate to the music of a good military band.  Every year in December a so-called ice-palace was built for the band, of clear blocks of ice.  Once given a design, ice-architecture is most fascinating and very easy.  Instead of mortar, all that is required is a stream of water from a hose to freeze the ice-blocks together, and as ice can be easily chipped into any shape, the most fantastic pinnacles and ornaments can be contrived.  Our ice-palace was usually built in what I may call a free adaptation of the Canado-Moresque style.  A very necessary feature in the ice-palace was the large stove for thawing the brass instruments of the band.  A moment’s consideration will show that in the intense cold of a Canadian winter, the moisture that accumulates in a brass instrument would freeze solid, rendering the instrument useless.  The bandsmen had always to handle the brass with woollen gloves on, to prevent getting burnt.  How curious it is that the sensation of touching very hot or very cold metal is identical, and that it produces the same effect on the human skin!  With thirty or more degrees of frost, great caution must be used in handling skate-blades with bare fingers if burns are to be avoided.  The coldest day I have ever known was New Year’s Day 1888, when the thermometer at Ottawa registered 41 degrees below, or 73 degrees of frost.  The air was quite still, as it invariably is with great cold, but every breath taken gave one a sensation of being pinched on the nose, as the moisture in the nostrils froze together.

The weekly club-dances of the Ottawa Skating Club were a pretty sight.  They were held in a covered public rink, gay with many flags, with garlands of artificial flowers and foliage, and blazing with sizzling arc-lights.  These people, accustomed to skates from their earliest childhood, could dance as easily and as gracefully on them as on their feet, whilst fur-muffled mothers sat on benches round the rink, drinking tea and coffee as unconcernedly as though they were at a garden-party in mid-July instead of in a temperature of zero.  An “Ottawa March” was a great institution.  Couples formed up as though for a country dance, the band struck up some rollicking tune, the leader shouted his directions, and fifty couples whirled and twirled, and skated backwards or forwards as he ordered, going through the most complicated evolutions, in pairs or fours or singly, joining here, parting there, but all in perfect time.  Woe betide the leader should he lose his head!  A hundred people would get tangled up in a hideous confusion, and there was nothing for it but to begin all over again.