Now,
then--off!"

There was a momentary hesitation, and then the boys struck the ice
almost at the same time. There was a ringing hissing sound, mingled
with a peculiar splitting as if the ice were parting from where they
started across the mere to the Toft, and then they were going at a
rapidly increasing speed straight for home.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

THE QUESTION.

There are many pleasures in life, and plenty of people to sing the
praises of the sport most to their taste; but it is doubtful whether
there is any manly pursuit which gives so much satisfaction to an adept
in the art as skating.

I don't mean skating upon the ornamental water of a park, elbowed here,
run against there, crowded into a narrow limit, and abortively trying to
cut figures upon a few square feet of dirty, trampled ice, full of
holes, dotted with stones thrown on by mischievous urchins to try
whether it will bear, and being so much unlike ice that it is hardly to
be distinguished from the trampled banks; but skating over miles of
clear black crystal, on open water, with the stars twinkling above like
diamonds, the air perfectly still around, but roaring far on high, as
Jack Frost and his satellites go hurrying on to mow down vegetation and
fetter streams; when there is so much vitality in the air you breathe
that fatigue is hardly felt, and when, though the glass registers so
many degrees of frost, your pulses beat, your cheeks glow, and a faint
dew upon your forehead beneath your cap tells you that you are
thoroughly warm. How the blood dances through the veins! How the eyes
sparkle! How tense is every nerve! How strong each muscle! The ice
looks like steel. Your skates are steel, and your legs feel the same as
stroke, _whish_! stroke, _whish_! stroke! stroke! stroke! stroke! away
you go, gathering power, velocity, confidence, delight, at the unwonted
exercise, till you feel as if you could go on for ever, and begin
wishing that the whole world was ice, and human beings had been born
with skates to their toes instead of nails.

Some such feelings as these pervaded the breasts of Dick Winthorpe and
Tom Tallington as they glided along homeward on that night. Every now
and then there was a sharp report, and a hissing splitting sound. Then
another and another, for the ice was really too thin to bear them
properly, and it undulated beneath their weight like the soft swell of
the Atlantic in a calm.

"Sha'n't go through, shal