Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion hard. But Bill stopped just
short of Fine Art, in High Artisanship.

How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display! How delighted the whole
population was to believe they possessed the best skater on the North
River! How they struggled to imitate! How they tumbled, some on their
backs, some on their faces, some with dignity like the dying Caesar, some
rebelliously like a cat thrown out of a garret, some limp as an ancient
acrobate! How they laughed at themselves and at each other!

"It's all in the new skates," says Wade, apologizing for his
unapproachable power and finish.

"It's suthin' in the man," says Smith Wheelwright.

"Now chase me, everybody," said Wade.

And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the merry crowd, until at last,
breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of
all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the ice.

"He rayther beats Bosting," says Captain Isaac Ambuster to Smith
Wheelwright. "It's so cold there that they can skate all the year round;
but he beats them, all the same."

The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of a skiff on the deck of
his tug, and rocking it like a cradle, as he talked.

"Bosting's always hard to beat in anything," rejoined the ex-Chairman.
"But if Bosting is to be beat, here's the man to do it."

* * * * *

And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I have said enough in behalf of
a limited fraternity, the Skaters.

The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause of the Lovers, a more
numerous body, and we will see whether True Love, which never makes
"smooth running," can help its progress by a skate-blade.

CHAPTER VI.

"GO NOT, HAPPY DAY, TILL THE MAIDEN YIELDS."

Christmas noon at Dunderbunk. Every skater was in galloping glee,--as the
electric air, and the sparkling sun, and the glinting ice had a right to
expect that they all should be.

Belle Purtett, skating simply and well, had never looked so pretty and
graceful. So thought Bill Tarbox.

He had not spoken to her, nor she to him, for more than six months. The
poor fellow was ashamed of himself and penitent for his past bad courses.
And so, though he longed to have his old flame recognize him again, and
though he was bitterly jealous and miserably afraid he should lose her, he
had kept away and consumed his heart like a true despairing lover.

But to-day Bill was a lion, only second