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.