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