of games, a panel for the drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the entrechats and pirouettes of its graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last two nights, sliding at full speed up and down the North River.
We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin under whose feet sprang roses; but Zero’s heels and toes were armed with more precious influences. They left a diamond way, where they slid, — a hundred and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.
Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it. Zero’s product, finer even than diamond, was filled — at the rate of a million to the square foot — with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet every one big enough to comprise the entire sun in small, but without alteration or abridgement. When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to catch the tip of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.
Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in Christendom.
On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.
