frozen ledges at the turnings of the road, silently gliding at a speed
that seems incredible, it is so smooth, he traverses two or three
miles without fatigue, carried onward by the mere momentum of his
weight. It is a strange and great joy. The toboggan, under these
conditions, might be compared to an enchanted boat shooting the rapids
of a river; and what adds to its fascination is the entire loneliness
in which the rider passes through those weird and ever-shifting scenes
of winter radiance. Sometimes, when the snow is drifting up the pass,
and the world is blank behind, before, and all around, it seems like
plunging into chaos. The muffled pines loom fantastically through
the drift as we rush past them, and the wind, ever and anon, detaches
great masses of snow in clouds from their bent branches. Or again at
night, when the moon is shining, and the sky is full of flaming
stars, and the snow, frozen to the hardness of marble, sparkles with
innumerable crystals, a new sense of strangeness and of joy is given
to the solitude, the swiftness, and the silence of the exercise.
No other circumstances invest the poetry of rapid motion with more
fascination. Shelley, who so loved the fancy of a boat inspired with
its own instinct of life, would have delighted in the game, and would
probably have pursued it recklessly. At the same time, as practised
on a humbler scale nearer home, in company, and on a run selected for
convenience rather than for picturesqueness, tobogganing is a very
Bohemian amusement. No one who indulges in it can count on avoiding
hard blows and violent upsets, nor will his efforts to maintain his
equilibrium at the dangerous corners be invariably graceful.

Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more monotonous than an Alpine
valley covered up with snow. And yet to one who has passed many months
in that seclusion Nature herself presents no monotony; for the changes
constantly wrought by light and cloud and alternations of weather