addicted than to skating. The deep
and sequestered lakes of this State, frozen by the intense cold of a
northern winter, present a wide field to the lovers of this pastime.
Often would I bind on my skates, and glide away up the glittering river,
and wind each mazy streamlet that flowed beneath its fetters on towards
the parent ocean, forgetting all the while time and distance in the
luxurious sense of the gliding motion--thinking of nothing in the easy
flight, but rather dreaming, as I looked through the transparent ice at
the long weeds and cresses that nodded in the current beneath, and
seemed wrestling with the waves to let them go; or I would follow on the
track of some fox or otter, and run my skate along the mark he had left
with his dragging tail until the trail would enter the woods. Sometimes
these excursions were made by moonlight, and it was on one of these
occasions that I had a rencontre, which even now, with kind faces around
me, I cannot recall without a nervous looking-over-my-shoulder feeling.

I had left my friend's house one evening just before dusk, with the
intention of skating a short distance up the noble Kennebec, which
glided directly before the door. The night was beautifully clear. A
peerless moon rode through an occasional fleecy cloud, and stars
twinkled from the sky and from every frost-covered tree in millions.
Your mind would wonder at the light that came glinting from ice, and
snow-wreath, and incrusted branches, as the eye followed for miles the
broad gleam of the Kennebec, that like a jewelled zone swept between the
mighty forests on its banks. And yet all was still. The cold seemed to
have frozen tree, and air, and water, and every living thing that moved.
Even the ringing of my skates on the ice echoed back from the Moccason
Hill with a startling clearness, and the crackle of the ice as I passed
over it in my course seemed to follow the tide of the river with
lightning speed.

I had gone up the river nearly two miles when, coming to a little stream
which empties into the larger, I turned in to explore its course. Fir
and hemlock of a century's growth met overhead, and formed an archway
radiant with frost-work. All was dark within, but I was young and
fearless, and as I peered into an unbroken forest that reared itself on
the borders of the stream, I laughed with very joyousness: my wild
hurrah rang through the silent woods, and I stood listening to the echo
that reverberated again a