wine, are left nowhere in the race. Not so the
merchants of walking-sticks; there is a brisk
demand for them, a walking-stick being much
affected by your inexperienced skater. Indeed,
such a supplementary prop is a serviceable thing,
and, whether planted on the ice to support the
beginner—in which case it always slips away
from him—or flourished wildly in the air to the
detriment of the eyes of other skaters, is a
graceful and convenient appendage.

The man who has brought what looks like an
engine of torture, but which is really an instrument
for ascertaining the height, weight, and
strength of those who may be anxious for
information on those subjects, has made a sad
mistake. What could he hope for, but the
neglect with which he is treated? Did he think
that skaters who had measured their length on
the ice would come and test the truth of their
estimate afterwards, or that persons of corpulent
proportions would wish to ascertain whether
they were too heavy to venture on the ice?

Among the component members of the crowd
upon the banks, two great classes are to be
found: the people who suffer from the cold, and
the people who enjoy the cold. These last
might sometimes surely be less defiantly hardy,
with great advantage to themselves and others.
It is most aggravating to see Old Bellows, for
instance, always stamping about and thumping
his chest with the perpetual old phrase about
the bracing nature of the air. We have no
objection to his being braced, far from it; but
there is no occasion for him to make such a fuss
about it, as if it were a very creditable thing to
be braced, and as if nobody were braced but
himself. Let him be braced quietly and modestly,
and let poor little Wriggles, who is home on
sick leave from India, and is shivering his soul
out, decline to be braced if he likes.

The single member of the Rifle Corps, who
walks up and down with a lady on his arm,
dressed in uniform, and with a red cock's plume
in his cap, is sufficiently punished by his own
feelings and by the sneers of passers-by, and
may be left without further censure or comment.
But the young man who has brought ladies with
him to see him skate, and who, while his skates
are being put on, becomes paler and paler with
every added strap—this young man who, when
at last fully equipped and launched forth upon
the world of ice, instantly falls down with a
sickly giggle as if he enjoyed the joke,—this
personage, we say, is of some importance,
because he at once leads us to that analysis of
falls, that great dissection of the art of tumbling,
which the world has hitherto strongly felt the
want of.

Shakespeare, when he puts into the mouth of
Touchstone that celebrated dissertation on the
different degrees of removal in a quarrel, is able, it
will be remembered, to dispose of his subject under
seven heads. It is not so with the degrees of
tumbling. This voluminous and most important
topic can be done justice to, in no fewer than
eight divisions. A greater degree of condensation,
a more merged classification, have been attempted
but the result was found to be imperfect, and
the reader may depend upon the subjoined
analysis as being reduced to the narrowest limits
compatible with a complete examination of the
subject.

There are—to deal with the matter after the
Touchstone manner—eight degrees, forms, or
modes of tumbling—no more, and no less.
There is, first, the "Fling utter;" secondly,
the "Smash complicated;" thirdly, the "Stagger
victorious;" fourthly, the "Scramble
ineffectual;" fifthly, the "Drop sudden;" sixthly,
the "Fall facetious;" seventhly, the "Tumble
truculent;" and, eighthly and lastly, the "Crash
unresisted."

Let us now examine each and go into this
fearful subject a little more in detail, beginning
at the beginning, with the Fling utter.
He who having attained the highest possible
degree of speed known in the annals of skating,
strikes suddenly against some particle of foreign
matter which has become embedded in the ice—
be it a stone, a frozen twig, or what not—he
who when thus checked, finds his feet cast up
into the air, and presently his body in such
violent contact with the ice that he slides along
upon his shoulder and his ear, fifteen yards,
before his legs have descended to the same
level with the portions of his anatomy just
hinted at—this man, and he alone, knows what
it is to have experienced the Fling utter. It is
a condition of tumbling wholly dependent upon,
and inseparable from, a great degree of speed,
and is intimately associated with that phenomenon
known to skaters as "the outside edge."
This Fling utter is a piteous accident. It is
frequent and terrible, and is attended by the
following symptoms: a smart tingling in the
ears, a sensation as of a rush of blood to the
back of the head, a vision before the eyes of
numerous black tadpoles ornamented with
diamond frontlets or coronets and floating in the
air, a sudden taste of base metal in the mouth,
a conviction on the part of the sufferer that his
neck has become shorter, that his vertebræ are
jammed together, that his heart is between his
teeth, that his legs are in his body, that his body
is up in his head, that his stomach is collapsed,
that his hands are affixed to his ankles and his
feet joined on to his wrists. Let us get on to
the Smash complicated.

This is an accident strangely connected with
peculiar states of the nervous system. You see
a man swooping down upon you; you have time
to avoid him, but you can't; a hideous fascination
draws you on, you meet with a dread
concussion, you embrace him and cling to him, and
he to you; your hat drops off, so does his; you
perform together a frenzied waltz, which brings
you to a slide; you are falling; remember, all
this time, the sliders descend upon you, and you
form the centre of an entangled mass of arms,
legs, and bodies, in which no person can identify
his own, till, the great crash over, the
sufferer crawls out of this seething mass of
humanity on his hands and knees, and very
commonly finds a recess or dimple in his hat, which