"Ah! but just keep up this end, will you?" said Mr. Biscoe, looking up, his face purple with the exertion of pulling at a refractory strap. "I was past here yesterday morning and saw that at the other end the men had broken up the ice for the deer or the waterfowl, and consequently what's there is only last night's frost, binding together the floating bits of yesterday, and likely to be very rotten." "Better have a board with 'Dangerous' or somethin' of that sort written on it and stuck up, hadn't we?" suggested Lord Hetherington, with Serpentine reminiscences. "Scarcely time to get one prepared, my lord," replied Mr. Biscoe, with a slight smile. "Here, two of you men take a rope and lay it across the ice just below that alder tree--that'll warn 'em; and you, Boyd, tell 'em all to keep above that line. No good having any bother if one can prevent it." And Mr. Biscoe hobbled down the bank and shot away across the lake, returning in an instant, and showing that if his skates were old-fashioned, he could keep pace with any of the young ones notwithstanding. "Nice exercise--very," said the colonel, who was getting so cold that he was almost prepared to risk the chance of a tumble, and "have a pair on." "I do like to see a woman skating; there's something in it that's--ah!" and the old colonel kissed the tips of his fingers, partly to warm them, partly to express his admiration. "Now, who is that in the brown velvet trimmed with fur?--she seems to know all about it." "That's my sister Caroline," said his lordship, looking through his double glass. "Yes, she skates capitally, don't she? Pretty dress, too; looks like those people in the pictures outside the polkas, don't it? Who's---- Oh, Mr. Joyce! How d'ye do, Mr. Joyce? My secretary; very decent young man, that." The colonel merely coughed behind his buckskin glove. He did not think much of secretaries, and shared Jack Cade's opinion in regard to the professors of the arts of reading and writing. Just then Lady Caroline approached the bank. "Colonel, are you inclined to back the service in general and your own regiment in particular? Mr. Patey and I are going to have a race. Of course he gives me a long start. Will you bet?" "Too delighted to have the chance of losing," said the colonel with old-fashioned gallantry. "And I'll give odds, too--a dozen pairs to half-a-dozen.--Patey, sustain the credit of the corps in every particular." "Depend on me, colonel," said Mr. Patsy, a long-limbed lieutenant of untiring wind. "Mr. Boyd, take Lady Caroline to her place, and then start us."