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 moanings 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. 
