HOLLER SKATES.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3814, 5 October 1883, Page 4

HOLLER SKATES.

The roller skate is a wayward little quadruped. It is as frolicsome and more innocent looking than a lamb, but for interfering with one's upright attitude in the community it is, perhaps the best machine that has appeared in Salt Lake City. One's first feeling on standing up on a pair of roller skates is an uncontrolable tendency to come from together. One foot may start toward Idaho, while the other as promptly strikes out for Arizona. The legs do not stand by each other as legs related by blood should do, but each shows a disposition to set up in business alone and leave you to take care of yourself as best you may. The awkwardness of this arrangement is apparent. While they are settting up independently there is nothing for you to do but to sit down and await future developments. And you have to sit clown, too, without having made any previous preparation for it, and without having devoted as much thought to it as you might have done had you been consulted in the matter.

One of tho most noticeable things at a skating rink is the strong attraction between the human body and the floor of the rink. If the human body had been coming through space for days and days at tho rate of a million miles a second, without sloping at eating stations and not excepting Sundays, when it strikes tho floor we can understand why it struck the floor with .so much violence. As it is, however, the thing is inexplicable. There arc diffcrcntkiiulsof falls in vogue at the rink. There are the rear falls and front falls, the Cardinal Wolsey fall, the fall one across the other, three in a pile, and so on. There arc some of tho falls that 1 wuuld like to be excused from describing. The rear fall is the favourite. It is more frequently utilised than any other. There arc two positions in skating, tho perpendicular and the horizontal. Advanced skaters prefer the perpendicular, while others affect the horizontal.

Skates are not respecters of persons. They will lay out a minister of the gospel or the. mayor of the city as readily as they will a short-coated, one-suspender boy or a giddy girl. When one of a man's feet starts for Nevada and tho other for Colorado, that does not separate him from the floor or break up his fun. Other portions of his body will take the place his feet have just vacated with a promptness that is surprising, and he will find that the fun has just begun—for the people looking on. The equipments for the rink are a pair of skates, a cushion, and a bottle of liniment.