when you get home
your clothes are frozen stiff on you--Oh, who would willingly miss such
sport?

And sleigh-riding! Me for sleigh-riding! You take a nice, sharp day in
winter, when the sky is as blue as can be because all the moisture is
frozen out of the air, a day when the snow under the sleigh runners
whines and creaks, as if thousands of tiny wineglasses were being
crushed by them, and the bells go jing-jing, jing-jing on the frosty
air which just about takes the hide off your face; when you hold your
mittens up to your ears and then have to take them down to slap yourself
across the chest to get the blood agoing in your fingers; when you kick
your feet together and dumbly wonder why it is your toes don't click
like marbles; when the cold creeps up under your knitted pulse-warmers,
and in at every possible little leak until it has soaked into your very
bones; when you snuggle down under the lap-robe where it is warm as
toast (day before yesterday's toast) and try to pull your shoulders up
over your head; when a little drop hangs on the end of your nose,
which has ceased to feel like a living, human nose, and now resembles
something whittled to a point; when you hold your breath as long as
you can, and your jaw waggles as if you were playing chin-chopper with
it--Ah, that's the sport of kings! And after you have got as cold as you
possibly can get, and simply cannot stand it a minute longer, you ride
and ride and ride and ride and ride and ride and ride and ride and ride.
Once in a while you turn out for another sleigh, and nearly upset in the
process, and you can see that in all points its occupants are exactly as
you are, just as happy and contented. There aren't any dogs to run out
and bark at you. Old Maje and Tige, and even little Bounce and Guess
are snoozing behind the kitchen stove. All there is is just jing-jing,
jing-jing, jing-jing, not a bird-cry or a sound of living creature.
jing-jing, jing-jing..... Well, yes, kind o' monotonous, but still....
You pass a house, and a woman comes out to scrape off a plate to the
chickens standing on one foot in a corner where the sun can get at them,
and the wind cannot. She scrapes slowly, and looks at you as much as to
say: "I wonder who's sick. Must be somebody going for the doctor, day
like this." And then she shudders: "B-b-b-oo-oo-oo!" and runs back into
the house and slams the door hard. You snuffle and look at the chimney
that has thick white smoke coming out