The Holbrook news., 1912-05-10


 her first impressions of Switz-
 erland in winter in the train
 coming back By the time you have settled down again at home, and sit in your parlor to retail your doings to your admiring and envious friends. the disagreeables, if any there have been, have faded into oblivion, and the joys of even a bad Swiss win ter, when entrusted with the rigors of the "old-fashioned" English article, strike one so forcibly that you can only gasp out incoherences about the time of your life" and the wicked waste of never having gone before. But in the train, when you perchance can still see from the window the peaks on which you have floated and slid and tumbled, and with the pros pect of eight weary, dark hours' jour ney to Paris) you can put things straight in your mind. writes R. M. Morrison in Country Life. You are not distracted by questions which bring home to you how sleepy and casual your observation has been. You are not shamed into excuses and depreciations before your experienced and expert friends, who have fled the Swiss winter in contempt and despair You are not compelled to go into the conventional ecstasies over the Alpine sunset. In the train your opinion is as honest as a mo- vices naive and rapturous opinion can be. Out of all your experiences, the sensations of one day shine out clear before all others. My most abid- ing memory is of a dazzling, brilliant day, of a three-mile ascent, skis in hand, from the village to untrodden and silent slopes, wall so warming that. the destination reached, I was glad to rest and lunch in the shade. I recall the quaint and mysterious ootprints-afterward identified as a deer's-found near the lunch tree and lazily pondered over. I glow at the remembrance of slope, five hundred yards long, virgin snow to the skier. I had been only three days a skier, and a successful ascent was still be- yond my dreams. fell, and with re- lief and surprise noted that I did not fulfil the prophecy of breaking my toes. I stood on the brow of the l slope and pushed myself of with the | baton, after the uncouth style of the | novice. For the briefest fraction of | a second I feared that my pose was Unbalanced and that I was fated to fall. The next, I was given up to the | joy of swift motion, of the sweeping career through the air and sunlight, | until flew out of the sun into shadow and suddenly grew cool and blind.
 I suppose everybody's introduction to skiing is very much the same. Everyone has to get over the inclina- ton to lift his feet and turn out his toes; most people have to fight down the awful feeling of terror which at tacks them, not on their debut, but on their second attempt and not a few. I hope, have the sense (and the knowledge of French) to be able to take in good part the grave com ments of the village children. These ten-year-old boys, to whom beautiful skiing seems second nature, can teach one much, although skiing IS not of the soil, but a recent, importa- tion from Norway. By the way, fail ing a native, the best tutor is an English schoolboy, who, having no re- gard for his own neck or yours. does not huster or fuss you. but rather i'm pels you to the most unheard-of feats.
 As soon as one has attained the smallest degree of comfort and grace on skis, one despises the lugeing which has hitherto seemed good enough fun for anyone. Truth to tell, Iugeing is all done on a track, to which one is tied, while at skiing one can at least pretend to be travelling. Again and again you take the fifteen walk up the track, dragging your luge behind you like child with it's toy, in order that you may whizz down in twentieth part of the time. ThA absurdity of this DroceedinE hA- |