CHAPTER XI
A COLD HOUSE
"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.