“tuke").  The club colours of course varied.  Rideau Hall was white with purple stockings and “tuke,” and red sash.  Others were sky-blue, with scarlet stockings and “tuke,” or crimson and black, or brown and green.  A collection of three hundred people in blanket-suits gave the effect of a peripatetic rainbow against the white snow.  For the “Arctic Cremorne” the rinks were all fringed with coloured fairy-lamps; the curling-rink and the tea-room above it were also outlined with innumerable coloured electric bulbs, and festoons of Japanese lanterns were stretched between the fir trees in all directions.  At the top of the toboggan slides powerful arc-lamps blazed, and a stupendous bonfire roared on a little eminence.  The effect was indescribably pretty, and it was pleasant to reflect how man had triumphed over Nature in being able to give an outdoor evening party in mid-winter with the thermometer below zero.  The gleaming crystals of snow reflecting the coloured lamps; the Bengal lights staining the white expanse crimson and green, and silhouetting the outlines of the fir trees in dead black against the burnished steel of the sky; the crowd of guests in their many-coloured blanket-suits, made a singularly attractive picture, with a note of absolute novelty in it; and the crash of the military band, the merry whirr of the skates, and the roar of the descending toboggans had something extraordinarily exhilarating about them in the keen, pure air.  The supper-room always struck me as being pleasingly unconventional.  Supper was served in the long, covered curling-rink, where the temperature was the same as that of the open air outside, so there was a long table elaborately set out with silver-branched candlesticks and all the Governor-General’s fine collection of plate, but the servants waited in heavy fur-coats and caps.  Of course no flowers could be used in that temperature, so the silver vases held branches of spruce, hemlock, and other Canadian firs.  The French cook had to be very careful as to what dishes he prepared, for anything with moisture in it would freeze at once; meringues, for instance, would be frozen into uneatable cricket-balls, and tea, coffee, and soup had to simmer perpetually over lamps.  One so seldom has a ball-supper with North Pole surroundings.  We had a serious toboggan accident one night owing to the stupidity of an old Senator, who insisted on standing in the middle of the track, and the Aides-de-Camps’ room was converted into an operating theatre, and reeked with the fumes of chloroform.  The young man had bad concussion, and was obliged to remain a week at Rideau Hall, whilst the poor girl was disfigured for life.