"will you please show these children how you cut ice, and store it away, so you can sell it when the hot summer days come?" asked daddy blake of one of the many men who, with horses and strange machinery, were gathered in a little sheltered cove of the lake.
"to be sure i will," the man answered. "just come over here and you will see it all."
"oh, but look at the water!" cried mab, as she pointed to a place where the ice had been cut, and taken out, leaving a stretch of black water.
"i won't let you fall in that," promised the man. "the ice is so thick this year, on account of the cold, that you could go close to the edge of the hole, and the ice would not break with you. see, there is a man riding on an ice cake just as if it were a raft of wood."
"oh, so he is!" cried hal, as he saw a man, with big boots and a long pole, standing on a glittering white ice-raft. the man was poling himself along in the water, just as daddy blake had pushed the boat along when he was spearing eels in the summer.
"he looks just like a picture i saw, of a polar bear on his cake of ice, up at the north pole," spoke charlie, "only he isn't a bear, of course," the little boy added quickly, thinking the man might think he was calling him names. the head ice man, and several others, laughed when they heard this.
"now, i'll show you how we cut ice, beginning at the beginning," said the head man, or foreman, as he is called.
"of course," the foreman went on, "we have to wait until the ice freezes thick enough so we men, and the horses won't break through it. when it is about eighteen inches thick, or, better still, two feet, we begin to cut. first we mark it off into even squares, like those on a checker board. a horse is hitched to a marking machine, which is like a board with sharp spikes in it, each spike being twenty-four inches from the one next to it. the spikes are very sharp.
"the horse is driven across the ice one way, making a lot of long, deep scratches in the ice, where the scratches criss-cross one another they make squares."
"what is that for?" hal wanted to know.
"that," the foreman explained, "is so the cakes of ice will be all the same size, nice and square and even, and will fit closely together when we pile them in the ice house. if we had the cakes of ice of all different shapes and sizes they would not pile up evenly, and we would waste too much room."
"i see!" cried mab. "it's just like the building blocks i had when i was a little girl."
"that's it!" laughed the foreman. "you remember how nicely you could pile your blocks into the box, when you put them all in evenly and nicely. but if you threw them in quickly, without stopping to make them straight, they would pile up helter-skelter, and maybe only half of them would fit. it is that way with the ice blocks."
"what do you do after you mark off the ice into squares?" charlie
johnson asked.
"then men come along with big saws, that have very large teeth, and they saw out each block. sometimes we cut the marking lines in the ice so deeply that a few blows from an axe will break the blocks up nice and even, and we don't have to saw them.
"then, after the cakes are separated, they are floated down to a little dock, and carried up into the store house. come we will go look at that store house now. but button up your coats well, for it is very cold in this ice store house."
the foreman led daddy blake and the children to a big house, five times as large as the one where the blake family lived. running up to this ice house from the ground near the lake, was a long incline, like a toboggan slide, or a long wooden hill. and clanking up this wooden hill was an endless chain, with strips of wood fastened across it.
the chain was something like the moving stairways which are in some department stores instead of elevators. only, instead of square, flat stairs there were these cross pieces of wood, to hold the cakes of ice from slipping down the toboggan slide back into the lake again.
men would float the ice cakes up to the end of the wooden hill. then, with sharp iron hooks, they would pull and haul on the cakes until they were caught on one of these cross pieces. then the engine that moved this endless chain, would puff and grunt, and up would slide the glittering ice, cake after cake.
at the top of the incline other men were waiting. they used their sharp hooks to pull the ice cakes off the endless chain, upon a platform of boards, and from there the cakes were slid along into the store house, where they were stacked in piles up to the roof, there to stay until they were needed in the hot summer, to make ice cream, lemonade and ice cream cones.
"oh, but it is cold in here!" cried mab as they went in the place where the ice was kept. and indeed it was, for there were tons and tons—thousands of pounds—of the frozen cakes. from them arose a sort of steam, or mist, and through this mist the men could hardly be seen as they stacked away the ice. the men looked like shadows moving about in a cold fog on a frosty, cold, wintry morning.
"bang! bang! clatter! smash! crash!" went the cakes of ice as they came up the incline, and slid down the long wooden chutes, where the men hooked them off and piled them up. pile after pile was made of the ice, until it was stacked up like an ice berg, inside the store house.
"why doesn't the ice melt when the hot summer comes?" asked hal.
"because this building keeps the hot sun off the ice," explained the foreman. "very little heat can get in our ice house, and it takes heat to melt ice. of course some of it melts, but very little. then, too, the building has two walls. in between the double walls is sawdust, and that sawdust helps to keep the heat out, and the cold in. it is like a refrigerator you see. ice melts very slowly in a refrigerator because the cold is kept in, and the outside heat kept out."
"oh, but it's cold here!" cried mab shivering. "let's go outside." and outside something very strange happened.
the children never would have believed it had they read it in a book. but as it really happened to them they knew that it was true, no matter how strange it was.
