er;--then, in fine, you may
become a Great Skater, just as with equal power and equal pains you may
put your grip on any kind of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats, the Big
Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade's
achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody. A
sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice
and a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its _corpus_ to
carve. Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains
an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.

Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate, its M.A., its
F.S.D., (Doctor of Frantic Skipping,) its A.G.D., (Doctor of Airy
Gliding,) its N.T.D., (Doctor of No Tumbles,) and finally its highest
degree, U.P. (Unapproachable Podographer).

Wade was U.P.

There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who had passed their Little Go and
could skate forward and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps, were
through the Great Go; these could do outer edge freely. A dozen had taken
the Baccalaureate, and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and
spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross their feet, on the edge,
forward and backward, and shift edge on the same foot, and so were
_Magistri Artis_.

Wade, U.P., added to these an indefinite list of combinations and fresh
contrivances. He spun spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He
pivoted on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings, inner and outer
edge, forward and back, He skated on one foot better than the M.A.s could
on both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels; he cut up shines like a
sunbeam on a bender; he swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased,
like a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not muscle, moved him;
he tore about in frenzies; his pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg
flapped like a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped, whirling
backward as he went, over a platoon of boys laid flat on the ice;--the
last boy winced, and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew over, and the
boy still holds together as well as most boys. Besides this, he could
write his name, with a flourish at the end, like the _rubrica_ of a
Spanish _hidalgo_. He could podograph any letter, and multitudes of
ingenious curlicues which might pass for the alphabets of the unknown
tongues. He could _not_ tumble.

It was Fine Art.

Bill