"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.