Skating on Jamaica Pond, near Boston

Description

"If the amateurs of sleighing have been disappointed this winter of their usual employment, the skaters have made the most of the absence of snow; and Jamaica Pond, being in the centre of a dense and spirited population, and near to the city, has been the arena whereon ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls have abandoned themselves to the glorious and exhilarating sport of skating, with a furore worthy of a carnival. At times there are more than fifteen hundred persons in and about the pond. The scenes offered have been very striking, and Mr. Rowse has put his impressions of them on the wood for us, having visited the spot to make the drawing from the life. Here may be seen a damsel, swift as Atalanta, speeding away on the shining steel, baffling the efforts of a dozen admirers to overtake her; there a young gentleman of the Winkle school, who has rashly embarked on a pair of smooth irons, and is now floundering about in hopeless agony. Now and then some on 'puts his foot in it' by disappearing in an ice-hole, as a poet of our acquaintance did the other day. Here and there an ambitious individual gives a specimen of his foot o-graph by writing his name at full length, with a few supplementary flourishes. Take it all in all, it is a scene worth seeing and remembering. The whole thing is entered into with a zest and gusto that makes the participants glow with the exercise, and the sport and hilarity are eminently congenial to the spirit of fun and good humor."