SLEDGES AND DOGS 



way, but it always seemed to me that there is vastly 

 more fun and frolic in a boy's life. One of the most 

 fascinating relaxations of our long winter was to watch 

 the boys at play. Every day we could hear their 

 shouts as they romped and tumbled in the snow. 

 They rolled huge snowballs, and hollowed them out 

 and hid in them ; they built proper little beehive snow 

 huts, and joined them by tunnels under the snow ; 

 and, more than anything else, they sledged and slid 

 down the hills. There was a steep slope beside my 

 window, where the drifting snow had filled the bed of 

 :he stream, and this was the great sledging-place. I 



matched them with a good deal of trepidation as they 

 jered down on little wooden runners strapped to 



icir feet miniature ski, whittled from a stick of 

 the family firewood but I never heard of an accident. 

 However fast they were going they seemed able to 

 dodge the lumps in the path, and avoided collisions 

 by twisting round in a sharp curve. If they fell at 

 all, they always seemed to tumble into a snowdrift, 

 and picked themselves up and shook their shaggy 

 heads, and tramped up the hill again shouting with 

 laughter. Sometimes they tried the less exciting 

 forms of tobogganing, dragging out little sledges 

 made for one, and built after the Eskimo pattern with 

 the cross-pieces bound with thongs to the runners, 

 and bumped madly down the hill ; or a party of boys 

 and girls joined at one of the big travelling sledges, 

 yelling and laughing, and shoving one another off 

 into the snow ; but the boys preferred their sliding 

 shoes. 



The rush and rumble of the runners on the hard 

 snow was a regular feature of winter life ; and on the 

 dull days, when the wind roared and the snow drove 



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