Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1910-02-06

mostly freezing upon the cheeks, and that in
tense, consuming longing to be hanging right
over the top of kitchen fire with four redhot
lids, with some Sensible Person popping her
head through the kitchen door and saying,
Well Mr.. Cake of Ice YOU did find out that
you no longer twelve years old, did you?
And it's mighty lucky you'll be if you don't
have pneumonia or something! Deed it's the
TRUTH
If | lived at Spitzbergen or Upernivik
IobolSk or Nlad1voStok or somewhere around
the headwaters Of the Yukon, why, probably
I'd ice skate for the lack of something else to
do: but, even then, am positive that would
not stultify myself by declaring that liked it.
And am almost maniacally glad that don't
live at any place where / have to ice skate for
the lack of something better to do.
The camel" declared the low comedy
maxim, can go ten days without water. but
who wants to be came?'
Similarly who'd want to be blubber lined
solely for the dubious joy of being ice skater?
Snowshoeine and Skeeing
SNOWSHOEING too: and skeeing; likewise
- curling, that Scottish Winter Sport on the
ice. lot of which is done by non-Scots in this
country: additionally, ice yachting; and so on.
They're all "br-r-rr-r" diversions excessively
so. The present writer ought to know, because
he has-once-tried them all After having
upon occasion, walked fully nine feet on
snowshoes, I've been wondering ever since why
anybody, barring of course the intrepid trap
pers Gall trappers are intrepid, aren't theys)
IN Kenmore CooperS tales, ever for a moment
considered putting such clumsy, horrfying,
turn-y ou-topside-down things on their feet.
The intrepid trappers had to wear EN- of
course, to traverse, in winter, those little dis
tances between the Mohawk Valley and Quebec
and between the foothills of the Adirondacks
and the western shore OF Lake Huron-mere
little trudges of six seven hundred miles or
SO. That is, maybe they traversed those dis
tances with snowshoes their feet: but I'd
admire exceedingly to be shown that they did,
at that!
But why ANYBODY nowadays should put on
snowshoes, when there trains and steam
boats and automobiles and aeroplanes and
dirigibles and things, and, worse than putting
them on, soemnly aver that walking in them IS
fun-that's the part of it that battles me.
Skees were invented by Scandinavian gentle
men who lived in the regime of Thor and Odin.
They invented them so that they could make
big jumps from peak to peak and then go home
and write Sagas telling all about what fine and
dandy fellows and what astounding jumpists
they were. Il sing myself" harps Olaf the
Wolf in his personally conducted Saga. " sing
about how jumped seven hundred and ninety
three feet and eight inches yesterday morning.
l. Olaf the Wolf did that so | sing Olaf!
How do we know, a thousand years or so after
O1af's demise, that he didn't just sit down
CATER going, well say 1.-TWO sleeps" out of the
general view and write his Saga or Saginaw,
when, matter of fact, he'd jumped no such
The writer hereof is not maintaining that he
ever skeed nimby from crag to crag like the
fossy channels: but he had a pair of EN- on
once, and that enough. Skeeing isn't a
sport. It's messy method of committing
suicide. Skee SkeeS!
Once upon time this writer, in pursuit of
the precarious journalistic profession, was given
the assignment to cover the attempt of a famous
Hudson River ice yachtsman to beat the En-
pire State Express for distance of thirty miles
or so. Covering" the assignment meant
riding on the ice yacht as ballast. l am not
going to write about this experience at ALL It's
bad enough to find oneself sitting up stark in
bed still half dreaming about that hideous per
Torrance, on an average of once a week (and
fifteen years afterward too), without arousing
the mental cell where the wretched memory is
slowed away by writing about it. But | will
say, in all wilful defiance, that nobody has
been able to tell me since that time that ice
yachting is Winter Sport any other kind
of sport The ice yachtsman may be-in fact,
generally is-a law abiding citizen and tax
payer; but he's berserker under his pelt, be
lieve me, and the madness of the Moro is in him
The Real Winter Sport
WHAT, then, is a good, practicable, recon-
w mendable Winter Sport? Well, I'll tell
you: Tiddedywinks!
Tiddledywinks, played in nice, cozy room
double windows, if the climate is severe);