74 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



that holds that mighty forest, all glory-tipped, reversed, in its 

 hard clear bosom. The fire is soon built to warm our freezing 

 fingers while the skates are fitted ; but it seems a fearful 

 thing to trust ourself out on mid-air thus — for so to our awed 

 sense, that dark translucent depth appears — as we shoot above 

 its mysteries, almost of our own volition, 



" And yet no footing seen." 



Motion soon dispels the chill of strangeness, and now with 

 hardy eagerness we spring away in facile glide among the 

 great trees, and soon we dart, and wind, and fly, as in that 

 marvelous sense of motion without wings, in overcoming space, 

 that sometimes visits us in dreams. How rapturous that 

 wild ecstacy of speed ! We flew past walls of trunks, run 

 into each other — we circled like thoughts, whirling as moun- 

 tain winds are eddied — into the light, and out, like glittering 

 shadows dimmed, while the ringing clangors of our steel-shod 

 heels receded in soft meanings from our swift way ! 



So sped our lives, winter and summer, as a vision goes, until 

 the time came at last when we must leave that old place, some 

 of us for wider fields of busy strife, out in the great world 

 of men, and others for college. With what fond regrets my 

 memory revisits those rude and pleasant scenes. They are 

 near the last of those still-life pictures, where the soul rests 

 calmly in the past. 



Now the action thickens as the opening turmoil hourly 

 includes new scenes, new experiences, with diversified excite- 

 ments rousing deeper passions. The boy is yet not all a boy, 

 and the consciousness of strange yearnings and new ambitions 

 begin to move his breast with undefined wonder. 



