You can soon try. Set your
chair on a spring-board out on the porch on Christmas-day; put your feet
in a pailful of powdered ice; have somebody to jingle a bell in one ear,
and somebody else to blow into the other with the bellows, and you will
have an exact idea of sleighing."

[This quotation would appear to be a variant of Dr. Franklin's
recipe for sleighing. As for Miss Martineau's experience
"behind the bells," it seems to have been very unfortunate.]

If the morning be fine, you have calls to make, or shopping to do, or
some meeting to attend. If the streets be coated with ice, you put on
your India-rubber shoes--unsoled--to guard you from slipping. If not,
you are pretty sure to measure your length on the pavement before your
own door. Some of the handsomest houses in Boston, those which boast the
finest flights of steps, have planks laid on the steps during the season
of frost, the wood being less slippery than stone. If, as sometimes
happens, a warm wind should be suddenly breathing over the snow, you go
back to change your shoes, India-rubbers being as slippery in wet as
leather soles are on ice. [It must be borne in mind that the writer is
speaking of the rubber shoes of sixty years ago.] Nothing is seen in
England like the streets of Boston and New York at the end of the
season, while the thaw is proceeding. The area of the street had been so
raised that passengers could look over the blinds of your ground-floor
rooms; when the sidewalks become full of holes and puddles they are
cleared, and the passengers are reduced to their proper level; but the
middle of the street remains exalted, and the carriages drive along a
ridge. Of course, this soon becomes too dangerous, and for a season
ladies and gentlemen walk; carts tumble, slip, and slide, and get on
as they can; while the mass, now dirty, not only with thaw, but with
quantities of refuse vegetables, sweepings of the poor people's houses,
and other rubbish which it was difficult to know what to do with while
every place was frozen up, daily sinks and dissolves into a composite
mud. It was in New York and some of the inferior streets of Boston that
I saw this process in its completeness.

If the morning drives are extended beyond the city there is much to
delight the eye. The trees are cased in ice; and when the sun shines out
suddenly the whole scene looks like one diffused rainbow, dressed in a
brilliancy which can hardly be conceived of