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 
feticrs 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, and 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 
