pants to his collar button, like a bicycle rider. Well, he had no business
to have told me and my chum that he used to be the best skater in
North America, when he was a boy. He said he skated once from Albany to
New York in an hour and eighty minutes. Me and my chum thought if Pa was
such a terror on skates we would get him to put on a pair of roller skates
and enter him as the 'great unknown,' and clean out the whole gang. We
told Pa that he must remember that roller skates were different from ice
skates, and that maybe he couldn't skate on them, but he said it didn't
make any difference what they were as long as they were skates, and he
would just paralyze the whole crowd. So we got a pair of big roller skates
for him, and while we were strapping them on, Pa looked at the skaters
glide around on the smooth wax floor just as though they were greased. Pa
looked at the skates on his feet, after they were fastened, sort of
forlorn like, the way a horse thief does when they put shackles on his
legs, and I told him if he was afraid he couldn't skate with them we would
take them off, but he said he would beat anybody there was there, or bust
a suspender. Then we straightened Pa up, and pointed him towards the
middle of the room, and he said, 'leggo,' and we just give him a little
push to start him, and he began to go. Well, by gosh, you'd a dide to have
seen Pa try to stop. You see, you can't stick in your heel and stop, like
you can on ice skates, and Pa soon found that out, and he began to turn
sideways, and then he threw his arms and walked on his heels, and he lost
his hat, and his eyes began to stick out, cause he was going right towards
an iron post. One arm caught the post and he circled around it a few
times, and then he let go and began to fall, and, sir, he kept falling all
across the room, and everybody got out of the way, except a girl, and Pa
grabbed her by the polonaise, like a drowning man grabs at straws, though
there wasn't any straws in her polonaise as I know of, but Pa just pulled
her along as though she was done up in a shawl-strap, and his
feet went out from under him and he struck on his shoulders and kept a
going, with the girl dragging along like a bundle of clothes. If Pa had
had another pair of roller skates on his shoulders, and castors on his
ears, he couldn't have slid along any better. Pa is a short, big man, and
as he was rolling along on his back, he looked like a sofa with castors on
being pu