SKATER CHASED BY WOLVES. 455 



addicted than to skating. The deep and sequestered lakes 

 of this State, frozen by the intense cold of a northern winter, 

 present a wide field to the lovers of this pastime. Often 

 would I bind on my skates, and glide away up the glittering 

 river and wind each mazy streamlet that flowed beneath its 

 fetters on toward the parent ocean, forgetting all the while 

 time and distance in the luxurious sense of the gliding motion 

 thinking of nothing in the easy flight, but rather dreaming, 

 as I looked through the transparent ice at the long weeds 

 and cresses that nodded in the current beneath, and seemed 

 wrestling with the wave to let them go ; or I would follow 

 the track of some fox or otter, and run my skate along the 

 mark he had left with his dragging tail until the trail would 

 enter the woods. Sometimes these excursions were made by 

 moonlight ; and it was on one of these occasions that I had a 

 rencontre which even now, with kind faces around me, I 

 cannot recall without a nervous looking-over-my-shoulder 

 feeling. 



I had left my friend's house one evening just before dusk, 

 with the intention of skating a short distance up the noble 

 Kennebec, which glided directly before the door. The night 

 was beautifully clear. A peerless moon rode through an 

 occasional fleecy cloud, and stars twinkled from the sky and 

 from every frost-covered tree in millions. Your mind would 

 wonder at the light that came glinting from ice, and snow- 

 wreath, and incrusted branches, as the eye followed for miles 

 the broad gleam of the Kennebec, that like a jeweled zone 

 swept between the mighty forests on its banks. And yet all 

 was still. The cold seemed to have frozen tree, and air, and 

 water, ana every living thing that moved. Even the ringing 

 of my skates echoed back from the Moccasin Hill with a 

 startling clearness, and the crackle of the ice as I passed 

 over it in my course seemed to follow the tide of the river 

 with lightning speed. 



I had gone up the river nearly two miles, when coming to 



