Klopstock, even in his old age, was so ardent a lover of it that, after skimming over the ice of Altona for hours, “to call back that warmth of blood which age and inactivity had chilled,” he retired to his study and wrote fiery lyrics in its praise. His friend and great successor, Goethe, took to skating under peculiar circumstances. He sought relief in violent exercise from embittered memories of a broken-off love affair. He tried in vain riding and long journeys on foot; at length he found relief when he went to the ice and learned to skate, an exercise of which he was devotedly fond to the last. “It is with good reason,” he writes, “that Klopstock has praised this employment of our physical powers which brings us in contact with the happy activity of childhood, which urges youth to exert all its suppleness and agility, and which tends to drive away the inertia of age. We seem, when skating, to lose entirely any consciousness of the most serious objects that claim our attention. It was while abandoning myself to these aimless movements that the most noble aspirations, which had too long lain dormant within me, were reawakened; and I owe to these hours, which seemed lost, the most rapid and successful development of my poetical projects.” That skating has been in certain circumstances something more than mere elegant accomplishment, is well illustrated by two anecdotes, told by the author of some entertaining “Reminiscences of Quebec,” of two settlers in the far West, who saved their lives by the aid of their skates. In one case the backwoodsman had been captured by Indians, who intended soon after to torture him to death. Among his baggage there happened to be a pair of skates, and the Indians’ curiosity was so excited that their captive was told to explain their use. He led his captors to the edge of a wide lake, where the smooth ice stretched away as far as the eye could see, and put on the skates. Exciting the laughter of the Indians by tumbling about in a clumsy manner, he gradually increased his distance from the shore, till he at length contrived to get a hundred yards from them without arousing their suspicion, when he skated away as fast as he could, and finally escaped. “The other settler is said to have been skating alone one moonlight night, and, while contemplating the reflection of the firmament in the clear ice, and the vast dark mass of forest surrounding the lake and stretching away in the background, he suddenly discovered, to his horror, that the adjacent bank was lined with a pack of wolves. He at once ‘made tracks’ for home, followed by these animals; but the skater kept ahead, and one by one the pack tailed off; two or three of the foremost, however, kept up the chase, but when they attempted to close with the skater, by adroitly turning aside, he allowed them to pass him. And after a few unsuccessful and vicious attempts on the part of the wolves, he succeeded in reaching his log hut in safety.”