But one does not go to Finse to sit in drawing-rooms, not, that is to say, till nightfall, when one collapses among cushions, exhausted after a day on skies. Finse is the greatest place in the world for ski-ing; in its season, that is to say, in March and April and the first weeks of May. During the Swiss season it is a place of fog and mist and some three hours’ precarious sunlight, but the snow is fine and hard there, when Mürren has become a bog. We went there as novices, Clifford Bax and I. And it is a good place, Finse, for the novice. It is built beside a lake, frozen over for the great part of the year; and the banks that slope gently down to it provide a scale of ascending difficulty. For the first morning one stumbles helplessly within a hundred yards of the hotel on a slope with a gradient of something, I suppose, like one in fifty. By the afternoon one has come to master it. And as one returns tired to one’s tea, one looks southwards beyond the lake and one says, “I think we’ll try that slope to-morrow.” One cannot, or at least we could not, cease in six days to be a novice. But we managed to amuse ourselves thoroughly climbing up slopes and falling down them. Perhaps, had we been more proficient, we should have enjoyed it less. A thing ceases to be exciting when you are certain of success, and you avoid the slope that you have been down ten times in succession without disaster. How thrilling a bicycle was in those early days. How proud we were to free-wheel down a hill, how we looked forward to the day when we should be able to mount and unmount without damage to our trousers. How we envied the blasé tradesboy who just seemed to pick up the handlebars and jump on the machine. And now that we can bicycle, the last thing that we would do would be to ride on one for pleasure. But then that is hardly a fair parallel. Cycling is a form of athletics limited in scope by cross-roads and motor regulations and police. You cannot enlarge your craft. But ski-ing must be like cricket, and must be always new. As soon as you can do a thing one way, you learn to do it in another. We spend hours in the nets at school learning to drive a straight half volley over the bowler’s head or past midoff along the grass. And then as soon as we have got it, we start trying to turn it to mid-wicket, so that I do not suppose we could drive the thing straight now even if we wanted, any more than Nevinson, an accurate draughtsman and a prizewinner at the Slade, could draw a horse that would resemble a photograph of one. And at Finse there must be always new worlds to conquer. And always there must be that splendid compensating sense of exhilaration that comes from a complete physical fitness. It would be hard to imagine a more healthy life. There is no bar there; and no late hours. You are in bed an hour before midnight. And you wake wonderfully fit to the most colossal breakfast that I have ever seen.