Women, and Children; and one big cheer for
Old Father Iron, as rousing a cheer as ever was roared."

So they gave their three times three with enormous enthusiasm. The roof
shook, the furnaces rattled, Perry Purtett banged with the Chairman's
hammer, the great echoes thundered through the Foundry.

And when they ended with one gigantic cheer for IRON, tough and true, the
weapon, the tool, and the engine of all civilization,--it seemed as if the
uproar would never cease until Father Iron himself heard the call in his
smithy away under the magnetic pole, and came clanking up, to return
thanks in person.

CHAPTER V.

SKATING AS A FINE ART.

Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its play-days,
there is no play like Skating.

To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel for the
drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the _entrechats_ and _pirouettes_
of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last
two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.

We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under
whose feet sprang roses; but Zero's heels and toes were armed with more
precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid,--a hundred
and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.

Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero's product,
finer even than diamond, was filled--at the rate of a million to the
square foot--with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big
enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or
abridgment. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to
catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.

Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite
marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and
grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg
could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though
polished with all the wax in Christendom.

On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee
was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.

Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and schooners
were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins,
the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing their bar-rooms,
regilding their br