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