Theodore Winthrop

“ To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power. And your machinery, — your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same shape stem and stem, — this must be as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it. ”

“ The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade’s achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams, Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula. ”

“ Wade said, “we’ll give Dunderbunk a laugh, as we practised last night.”
They got under full headway, Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands. When they were near enough to the merry throng out in the stream, both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd.
Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a grand show of
Skating as a Fine Art. The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects them to do their duty. ”