It is greatly to the advantage of skiing that you can get an immense amount of enjoyment from it without being an expert. There is more pure fun in learning how to ski than in any other form of sport I know. The slopes where first you practised remain in the memory longer than many a subsequent tour, for the big tours become a composite picture after a time, so that even the photographs you took are impossible to “place.” But that first slope is never forgotten. There you fell backwards, forwards, sideways; there you wallowed, struggled, kicked; and there, often enough, you simply stuck, jammed like a jigsaw puzzle, staring with sheer amazement into parts of your anatomy you had never seen before, feeling disentanglement of legs and arms a sheer impossibility. To be believed, these contortions must be seen. “You’ll go like the wind in a day or two,” said the man who imagined he was helping me, the first time I stood on ski. Then wind goes backwards, was my silent rejoinder. There was no breath to speak. And the truth is, no one can help much, Beyond giving a general idea of how to stand, how to place the feet, and how to hold the guiding sticks, verbal advice is of comparatively small assistance. Example counts, of course; and to observe a clever runner is an inspiration in itself. For the rest, a few days’ practice on a friendly slope near home, followed by half-day trips to give variety of steepness, angle, kinds of different snow, seems invariably the quickest way to learn. The first winter I went to Switzerland, skating and tobogganning were the enjoyments I chiefly had in view; but I thought I might just as well ski a bit too. With others it may be different, but before a month was gone the skating-rink saw me no more. Grinding round and round a circumscribed space with the eye always upon a bilious-looking orange somehow lost its attractiveness, and tobogganning was only worth considering when the condition of snow upon the open heights made skiing quite impossible. That upper world of dazzling white, in windless sunshine and beneath a cloudless sky, once tasted, becomes irresistible. I followed the routine like most others. I went to the Bazaar de la Poste and hired a villainous pair of ski at 20fr. for the season. I thought them perfect, the fastenings admirable, the length and weight and curve just right, and I used them almost daily for three months. Hundreds of miles they carried me, above the tree-line, into unknown silent valleys, over ridges innumerable, into what always seemed absolutely undiscovered country; they did not break when I fell; they took the snow grandly, waxed or unwaxed; and I regarded them as cheap and glorious invitations into Fairyland, But in all this I was supremely lucky. Cheap they certainly were, but in all other respects I should regard them now as worthless, even dangerous. Reasonably good ski may, of course, be hired at a Bazaar de la Poste as well as at a recognised Sports-Arlikel Bureau in Geneva, but the chances are against it. “It’s a marvel they didn’t break the first time you put them on,” the expert told me afterwards; “you must have had a lot of unnecessary falls with them.” It is nice to have one’s clumsiness explained in this way; but his remarks were valuable as well. For he showed me how the grain must never run off the ski, but flow straight down its entire length, because where the grain runs off indicates a probable breaking place; and he told me to choose the hard American hickory when posible and to use fastenings that make it quite easy to kneel without hurting toes or ankles. “It’s a wonder to me,” he added, looking at the fastenings that had given me many a painful wrench when falling, “that your toes are not all broken long ago.” Nowadays, in a Swiss winter hotel, there is always someone who will guide the novice in his selection and steer him away from needless danger; and it is unnecessary here to enter into endless detail on these very important points. There are books galore which indulge in this till the reader sinks exhausted and feels the art of skiing is entirely beyond him. Having got your instruments and having practised near home sufficiently to be able to balance with a reasonable speed and steepness, able to turn a little too, in case a horrid tree rushes suddenly towards you (as a tree invariably does), it is time pack a knapsack with chicken and oranges, chocolate, and peppermint lozenges for the inevitable thirst⁠—and start at dawn for a rousing trip among the lonely heights. You carry your big waterproof gauntlets for the descent, and you take an extra pair of warm woollen gloves for the freezing ridges; also a paper waistcoat or Shetland vest, or anything you can muster that you hope will keep the wind out.