very much out of practice at first, except Mr. K---, who skated
every day, taking short cuts across the lake to track a stray heifer
or explore a blind gully.

I despair of making my readers see the scene as I saw it, or of
conveying any adequate idea of the intense, the appalling loneliness
of the spot. It really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter,
so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out
into stronger relief. On either hand rose up, shear from the waters
edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark
pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the
deep _crevasses_ and fissures of the Snowy Range. Behind us
stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to this
mountain tarn, and Mr. K---'s little hut and scrap of a garden and
paddock gave the one touch of life, or possibility of life, to this
desolate region. In spite of all scenic wet blankets we tried hard
to be gay, and no one but myself would acknowledge that we found the
lonely grandeur of our "rink" too much for us. We skated away
perseveringly until we were both tired and hungry, when we returned
to Mr. K---'s hut, took a hasty meal, and mounted our chilled
steeds. Mr. C. H--- insisted on bringing poor Mr. K--- back with
us, though he was somewhat reluctant to come, alleging that a few
days spent in the society of his kind made the solitude of his
weather-board hut all the more dreary. The next day and yet the
next we returned to our gloomy skating ground, and when I turned
round in my saddle as we rode away on Friday evening, for a last
look at Lake Ida lying behind us in her winter black numbness, her
aspect seemed more forbidding than ever, for only the bare steep
hill-sides could be seen; the pine forest and white distant
mountains were all blotted and blurred out of sight by a heavy pall