en, a big
wind came and swept away every particle of snow that had fallen from the
twenty miles of ice which divided St. Petersburg from Cronstadt, thus
giving us such an opportunity for a day's skating on a grand scale as we
might never meet with again throughout our lives.

My cousin Tom had an idea in the evening just before bed-time, with the
result that we ordered sandwiches for an early hour next morning and
went to bed promptly, our minds full of the delightful day we were going
to spend on the Gulf of Finland, now a shining field of splendid, smooth
ice.

The great day broke magnificently, a glorious, sunshiny December day,
the thermometer at zero, or near it, but the air so dry and bathed in
sun that one was not conscious of the cold.

Oh, the joy of feeling oneself flying through the air as we raced side
by side over the firm, glass-like plain of ice! We must have skated at
full pace for five miles at least before we pulled up, puffing and
gloriously happy, in response to an exclamation from Tom.

'It's splendid,' he said, 'and I should like to go on for miles and
miles; but Father warned me to look out when we came somewhere near the
middle of the gulf; he has skated here a good deal in former years, and
he says one must be on the look-out for fissures which are caused by a
very hard frost like this; the ice suddenly cracks and parts, sometimes
only a few inches, sometimes several feet, even up to fifteen feet or
so. I believe I see a crack on ahead, and that's why I stopped.'

We skated slowly forward a short way. Sure enough, there opened out
before our eyes, plain as possible, a fissure of several feet in width,
the water looking black and cruel as it welled up to the edge of the ice
as though it longed to get at us.

'Nice sort of place if one had skated up to it at dusk, eh?' said Tom.

The water certainly looked very grim.

'It's all very well, but what are we going to do?' said I. 'It will be
no fun if this is the end of our skate, and we can't get to Cronstadt!'

'Perhaps it's only a local crack; we will skate along it, first one way
and then the other, and see.'

We did so, but it appeared that the spot at which we originally struck
the fissure was the narrowest place; it widened at either side.

We stood and stared at it. Tom spoke first.

'_Dare_ you?' he asked.

I saw what he meant and remained silent, considering. 'It's about six
feet,' I said, 'I suppose one could fly it--both fee