All degrees of skill and courage
and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true
way to toboggan is alone and at night. First comes the tedious
climb, dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing-
space, alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the
heart. Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way; she begins to
feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to gallop. In a breath you are
out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels
and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for by this time
your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you are spinning
round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the lights in
all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet; and the next you
are racing once more in the shadow of the night with close-shut teeth
and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on the
highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmosphere
tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with
stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the
pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of
man upon his planet.
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