"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 machinery¹, were gathered in a little sheltered cove² 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 pointed³ 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, standing⁴ 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 eels⁵ 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," spoke⁶ 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 hitched⁷ to a marking machine, which is like a board with sharp spikes⁹ in it, each spike⁸ 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."
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