He was an influential member of the Cercle des Patineurs
in Paris. Steinmetz arrived soon after, to look on, as he told his many
friends. He was, he averred, too stout to skate and too heavy for the
little iron sleds on the ice-hills.
"No, no!" he said, "there is nothing left for me but to watch. I shall
watch De Chauxville," he added, turning to that graceful skater with a
grim smile. De Chauxville nodded and laughed.
"You have been doing that any time this twenty years, mon ami," he said,
as he stood upright on his skates and described an easy little figure on
the outside edge backward.
"And have always found you on slippery ground."
"And never a fall," said De Chauxville over his shoulder, as he shot
away across the brilliantly lighted pond.
It was quite dark. A young moon was rising over the city, throwing out
in dark relief against the sky a hundred steeples and domes. The long,
thin spire of the Fortress Church--the tomb of the Romanoffs--shot up
into the heavens like a dagger. Near at hand, a thousand electric lights
and colored lanterns, cunningly swung on the branches of the pines, made
a veritable fairyland. The ceaseless song of the skates, on ice as hard
as iron, mingled with the strains of a band playing in a kiosk with open
windows. From the ice-hills came the swishing scream of the iron runners
down the terrific slope.
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