; their mismanagement will lead to many days of
vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is
certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate
under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long
tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar
outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotsman may remember
the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a
_hurlie_; he may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as,
laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now
successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot;
he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and
many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson. The toboggan
is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a hurlie upon
runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of
beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The
correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit
hindforemost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few
steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the
feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes
the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends
in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very
steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too
appalling to be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes;
your blind steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all
the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though you
had just been subjected to a railway accident. Another element of joyful
horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan being tied to
another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the first rider
being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their feet
and follow their leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad descent.
This, particularly if the track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of
the most exhilarating follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid
is early reconciled to somersaults.

There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some miles
in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short rivers,
furious in their brevity. All degrees of skill and courage