OUR ICE-SUPPLY AND ITS DANGERS. 675 



to the various openings. The ice-mass, which is quite imposing as one 

 looks across it in the larger houses, must be carefully and skillfully 

 packed, and be self-supporting. Many a dealer has come to grief by 

 the fall of his building from the collapse of the ice-mass within. The 

 construction of the great and elaborate ice palaces with which the 

 people of Montreal and St. Paul sometimes amuse themselves in winter 

 is comparatively simple, because water is poured in between the blocks, 

 and the whole freezes to a solid mass as it rises. But the art of the 

 commercial ice-builder consists in making his ice-mass solid enough to 

 stand alone with just as little freezing together of the cakes as possible. 



The more responsible harvesters are particular about the appear- 

 ance of the ice which is stored, and if a block is dirty from inclosed 

 sand, grass, weeds, etc., it has to be thrown away. That sounds very 

 simple, to throw away a cake of ice. But if one fancies that, in doing 

 it, the offending object is dragged bodily off by hand out of the way, 

 he underrates the value of machinery, gravity, and American enter- 

 prise. No, the offending block is floated on toward the elevator 

 along with the rest, and goes up in line like any reputable sheep. But 

 its Nemesis awaits it at the top in the person of a man with a spiked 

 stick, with which he unceremoniously bounces it off the end of the 

 platform into a heap of broken ice below by one quick, skillful thrust. 



Too much ice must not be grooved out by the plows in advance, 

 lest in case of rain the channels should fill and freeze solid and the 

 labor be wasted. So it is frequently necessary for the workers at the 

 plow to be out long before light in the morning, grooving out blocks 

 for the harvesters when the day begins. It is a picturesque sight, 

 these hardy men, muffled to their ears, following the gingerly-treading 

 teams back and forth over the ice-fields by the light of flaring, smoky 

 torches hung on poles stuck in the ice. More than once the swinging 

 lamps which have done patriotic duty in some campaign torch-light 

 processioji have found themselves relegated to the austere and chilling 

 duty of illuminating hoary ice-fields before the dawn, instead of lend- 

 ing force to the political claims and convictions of would-be or would- 

 continue-to-be American statesmen after dark. 



Serious accidents are not frequent upon the ice-fields, but occasion- 

 ally a horse breaks through or slips off into the icy water, and has to 

 be hauled out with ropes. The men, too, frequently enough, get an 

 unexpected bath amid the jeers of their fellows. A change of cloth- 

 ing and a stiff horn of whisky are the not unM'illingly endured penal- 

 ties which such an awkwardness entails. 



At Highland Lake, which lies in the hollow of a natural rocky ter- 

 race a short distance back from and above the Hudson below West 

 Point, no power other than that of gravity is used in carrying the ice 

 to the houses some distance away. A wooden runway leads from the 

 edge of the lake down the hill. Down this the ice-cakes glide one 

 after another as they are fed in directly from the water-level above. 



