Daddy Takes Us Skating Page 4

  "Oh, we're going on a pic-nic, Mary!" cried Mab, thinking perhaps herlittle girl friend had come to ask her to go skating.

  "So are we!" exclaimed Charlie, and he smiled at Daddy Blake, wholaughed heartily.

  "Oh, how funny!" cried Hal. "Are you going to where we are going, Iwonder?"

  The Johnson children looked at Mr. Blake and giggled.

  "Yes," he answered with a smile, "they are going to the same place weare, Hal and Mab. I invited them to go with us, as I thought you wouldlike company. And I guess mamma put up lunch enough for all of us;didn't you?" he asked, turning toward his wife.

  "Indeed I did!" cried Mamma Blake. "There's a fine lunch."

  "Oh, how lovely of you to come with us!" cried Mab, as she put herarms around Mary.

  "It's just dandy!" shouted Hal, clapping Charlie on the back. Then, ashe saw that Charlie was carrying his sister Mary's skates, Hal tookMab's and put them on a strap with his own, saying:

  "I'll carry them for you, Mab!"

  "Thank you," she said, most politely. "You are very kind."

  "Well, do you like my little surprise?" asked Daddy Blake as theystarted off toward the lake, to hold their winter pic-nic.

  "Surely we do!" answered Hal. "It's fine that you asked Mary andCharlie to come with us."

  It was quite cold out in the air, and, as Mab had said, it did looklike snow. There were dull, gray clouds in the sky, and the sun didnot shine. But the children were happy for all that. In a little whilethey reached the big frozen lake, and, putting on their skates theystarted to glide over the ice.

  "We will skate about a mile, and then we will rest, and have a littleskating race, perhaps, and afterward we can eat our lunch."

  "And what will we do after that?" asked Charlie.

  "Oh, skate some more," answered Daddy Blake. "That is if you want to."

  The children had much fun on their skates.

  And once, when Charlie sat down on the ice, to punch with his knife ahole in his strap, so that it would fit tighter, something happened.Charlie laid down his knife, and when he went to pick it up, he foundthat it had sunk down in the ice, making a little hole for itself tohide in.

  "Oh, look here!" he cried. "My knife has dug down in the ice just likeyour dog Roly-Poly used to dig a hole for a bone."

  "Poor Roly!" sighed Mab. "I wish we had him now!"

  "But he's gone," said Hal. "Well never see him again," and he lookedat Charlie's knife down in the ice. "What made it do that, Daddy?" heasked. "What made it sink down?"

  "The knife was warmer than the ice, and melted a hole in it,"explained Mr. Blake. "The knife was warm from being in Charlie'spocket.

  "I read once about some men who went up to the North Pole," hecontinued. "They had with them a barrel of molasses, but it was socold at the North Pole that the molasses was frozen solid. When themen wanted any to sweeten their coffee they would have to chopout chunks with a hatchet. They had very little sugar and so usedmolasses.

  "Once one of the men, after chopping some frozen molasses forbreakfast, forgot what he was doing, and left the hatchet on top ofthe solid, frosty sweet stuff in the barrel. The next time he wantedthe hatchet to chop with he could not find it. The hatchet had meltedits way down through the frozen molasses, until it came to the bottomof the barrel, inside, and there it stayed until all the sweet stuffwas chopped out in the spring."

  The children laughed at this funny story, and a little later theybegan skating around. They had races among themselves. Hal raced withCharlie, and once he won, and once Charlie did. But Mab, who racedwith Mary, won both times. Mab was becoming a good skater, you see.

  And such fun as it was eating lunch in the log cabin. The littlebuilding kept off the cold wind, and Daddy Blake built a fire on theold hearth. Hot chocolate was made; and how everyone did enjoy it!

  After lunch they all went skating again. As they glided around alittle point of land, that stuck out in the lake, Hal, who was skatingon ahead, cried out, in a surprised voice:

  "Oh, look at the men and horses on the ice! What are they doing?"

  "Cutting ice," said Daddy Blake. "Come, we will go over and see how itis done," and away they all skated to where the men were gathering theharvest of ice, just as farmers gather in their harvest of hay andgrain.

  CHAPTER XI

  A COLD HOUSE

  "Will you please show these children how you cut ice, and store itaway, so you can sell it when the hot summer days come?" asked DaddyBlake of one of the many men who, with horses and strange machinery,were gathered in a little sheltered cove of the lake.

  "To be sure I will," the man answered. "Just come over here and youwill see it all."

  "Oh, but look at the water!" cried Mab, as she pointed to a placewhere the ice had been cut, and taken out, leaving a stretch of blackwater.

  "I won't let you fall in that," promised the man. "The ice is so thickthis year, on account of the cold, that you could go close to the edgeof the hole, and the ice would not break with you. See, there is a manriding 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 longpole, standing on a glittering white ice-raft. The man was polinghimself along in the water, just as Daddy Blake had pushed the boatalong when he was spearing eels in the Summer.

  "He looks just like a picture I saw, of a Polar bear on his cake ofice, up at the North Pole," spoke Charlie, "only he isn't a bear, ofcourse," the little boy added quickly, thinking the man might think hewas calling him names. The head ice man, and several others, laughedwhen they heard this.

  "Now, I'll show you how we cut ice, beginning at the beginning," saidthe head man, or foreman, as he is called.

  "Of course," the foreman went on, "we have to wait until the icefreezes 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, webegin to cut. First we mark it off into even squares, like those on achecker board. A horse is hitched to a marking machine, which is likea board with sharp spikes in it, each spike being twenty-four inchesfrom 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 anotherthey make squares."

  "What is that for?" Hal wanted to know.

  "That," the foreman explained, "is so the cakes of ice will be all thesame size, nice and square and even, and will fit closely togetherwhen we pile them in the ice house. If we had the cakes of ice of alldifferent shapes and sizes they would not pile up evenly, and we wouldwaste too much room."

  "I see!" cried Mab. "It's just like the building blocks I had when Iwas a little girl."

  "That's it!" laughed the foreman. "You remember how nicely you couldpile your blocks into the box, when you put them all in evenly andnicely. But if you threw them in quickly, without stopping to makethem straight, they would pile up helter-skelter, and maybe only halfof them would fit. It is that way with the ice blocks."

  "What do you do after you mark off the ice into squares?" CharlieJohnson asked.

  "Then men come along with big saws, that have very large teeth, andthey saw out each block. Sometimes we cut the marking lines in the iceso deeply that a few blows from an axe will break the blocks up niceand even, and we don't have to saw them.

  "Then, after the cakes are separated, they are floated down to alittle dock, and carried up into the store house. Come we will go lookat that store house now. But button up your coats well, for it is verycold in this ice store house."

  The foreman led Daddy Blake and the children to a big house, fivetimes as large as the one where the Blake family lived. Running up tothis ice house from the ground near the lake, was a long incline, likea toboggan slide, or a long wooden hill. And clanking up this woodenhill was an endless chain, with strips of wood fastened across it.

  The chain was something like the moving stairways which are in somedepartment stores instead of elevators
. Only, instead of square, flatstairs there were these cross pieces of wood, to hold the cakes of icefrom 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 untilthey were caught on one of these cross pieces. Then the engine thatmoved this endless chain, would puff and grunt, and up would slide theglittering ice, cake after cake.

  At the top of the incline other men were waiting. They used theirsharp hooks to pull the ice cakes off the endless chain, upon aplatform of boards, and from there the cakes were slid along into thestore house, where they were stacked in piles up to the roof, thereto 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 placewhere the ice was kept. And indeed it was, for there were tons andtons--thousands of pounds--of the frozen cakes. From them arose a sortof steam, or mist, and through this mist the men could hardly be seenas they stacked away the ice. The men looked like shadows moving aboutin a cold fog on a frosty, cold, wintry morning.

  "Bang! Bang! Clatter! Smash! Crash!" went the cakes of ice as theycame up the incline, and slid down the long wooden chutes, where themen hooked them off and piled them up. Pile after pile was made of theice, 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 theforeman. "Very little heat can get in our ice house, and it takes heatto 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 islike a refrigerator you see. Ice melts very slowly in a refrigeratorbecause the cold is kept in, and the outside heat kept out."

  "Oh, but it's cold here!" cried Mab shivering. "Let's go outside." Andoutside 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, nomatter how strange it was.

  CHAPTER XII

  A GREAT SURPRISE

  "How do you get the ice out of this big house when you want it in thesummer time?" asked Hal, as the foreman led them along the woodenplatforms out of the big, cold storehouse. And how much warmer it wasoutside; even if the sun did not shine, than it was in the ice house.The children were glad to come out.

  "We load the ice from here into freight cars," the man explained."See, the ice house is built in two parts, with a passage-way between.And is this passage is a railroad track. The engine backs a freightcar in here, the big doors of the car are opened, and the ice is slidin on wooden chutes, something like the iron chutes the coal man uses.Then, when the car is full, it is pulled down to the city in a longtrain, with other cars."

  "And then the icemen come with their wagons, get the ice and bring itto us," finished Mab. "I've seen them."

  "That's right, little lady!" said the foreman with a laugh. Andsometimes ice comes to the city by a boat, instead of in freight cars,and the men with wagons go down to the boat-dock to get the cold,frozen cakes. And now you have seen how ice is cut in winter, andstored away until we need it in the summer."

  "My!" exclaimed Hal, as he looked up at the big ice store-house."There must be enough ice in there for the whole world!"

  "Oh, no indeed!" cried Daddy Blake. "No enough for one city. Andbesides this ice, which is called natural, because Jack Frost andMother Nature make it, there is other ice, called artificial. That iswhat is made by machinery."

  "Why, can anybody make ice by machinery?" asked Mab in surprise.

  "Oh, yes, even on the hottest day in summer," her papa told her. "Butit takes a lot of machinery. It is done by putting water into smallmetal tanks, and then by taking all the warmth out of the water bydipping the tanks into a big vat of salt and water which is made verycold by something called ammonia. It is too hard for you to understandnow, but when you get older I will explain. Now I think we had betterbe skating home," said Daddy Blake.

  As they walked down to the frozen lake, there was a barking sound froma small shed under which was an engine, that hauled up the ice cakes.Out from the shed rushed a little dog, spotted black and white, andstraight for the Blake children he rushed, barking and wagging histail so that it almost wagged off.

  "Look out!" cried Daddy Blake.

  "Don't be afraid!" called the engineer, laughing. "He's so gentle hewouldn't hurt a baby!"

  And how strangely the dog was acting! He would jump up first on Hal,and then on Mab, trying to lick their faces and hands with his redtongue.

  "Oh dear!" cried Mab, who was a little bit frightened.

  "He won't hurt you!" exclaimed the engineer. "Here, Spot!" he called."Leave the children alone. Be good, Spot!"

  But the dog would not mind. He jumped up on Hal, barking as loudly ashe could, and wagging his tail so hard that it is a wonder it did notdrop off. The animal seemed wild with delight.

  "Why! Why!" cried Mab, as she looked carefully at the dog when hestood still a moment to rest after all the excitement. "That dog looksjust like our Roly-Poly, only Roly was white and not spotted black andwhite," said Mab.

  "Well, when I got this dog he was all white," explained the engineer."He got spotted black by accident."

  "I wonder if that could be Roly?" spoke Daddy Blake thoughtfully."Here, Roly-Poly!" he called. "Come here, sir!"

  In an instant the dog made a jump for Daddy Blake, barking joyfully,and almost turning a somersault.

  "I believe it is Roly!" shouted Hal. "It's our dog!"

  "But how could it be?" asked Mab. "Roly was lost under the ice."

  "And that's just where I got this dog," the engineer explained. "Outfrom under the ice. One day, after the first freeze this winter, I wasBalking along a little pond. I came to a thin place in the ice, andlooking through, from the shore where I stood, I saw a little whitedog down below, just as if he were under a pane of glass.

  "I broke the ice with a stick and got him out. I thought he was dead,but I took him home, thawed him out, gave him some hot milk, and soonhe was as lively as a cricket. And I've had this dog ever since. WhenI came here to work at ice cutting I brought him with me."

  "But you said he was pure white when you got him out," said DaddyBlake wonderingly.

  "Yes, that's right," answered the ice engineer. "So he was. And how hegot spotted was like this. I was blacking my boots one day, and I leftthe bottle of black polish on a low bench. The dog grabbed it, playfullike, and the black stuff spilled all over him. That's how he gotspotted. He was worse than he is now, but it's wearing off."

  "Then I'm sure this is our Roly-Poly!" cried "Oh, you dear Roly!" shecried, and the spotted poodle dog tried to climb up in her arms andkiss her, he was so glad to see her.

  "I believe it is Roly," said Daddy Blake. "It is all very wonderful,but it must be our Roly."

  "Well, if he's yours, take him," said the engineer kindly. "I alwayswondered how he got under the ice. But of course he could not tellme."

  "We were skating, the children and I, one day," explained Daddy Blake."Poor Roly slipped through an air hole in the ice. Then he must havefloated down the pond underneath the ice, until he came to anotherthin place, where you saw him."

  "I guess that's it," the engineer agreed. "He was almost drowned andnearly frozen when I found him. But I'm glad he's all right now, andI'm glad the children have him back."

  "Oh, and maybe we aren't glad!" cried Mab. "Aren't we, Hal?"

  "Well, I guess!" he cried. "The gladdest ever!"

  Roly-Poly was happy too. He was so glad that he did not know whom tolove first, nor how much. He raced back and forth from the children toMr. Blake, and then over to the kind engineer, who had saved his life.

  "Oh, let's hurry home!" cried Mab. "I want to show mamma and AuntLolly and Uncle Penn
ywait that Roly-Poly is still alive."

  And so Daddy Blake and the children skated down to the end of thelake, Roly-Poly running along with them. He had barked his good-byesto the engineer, and Daddy Blake and Hal and Mab had thanked the niceman over and over again.

  "Don't fall through any more air holes, Roly!" cautioned Hal, as heskated along with Charlie, while Mab glided slowly at the side ofMary.

  "Bow-wow!" barked Roly, which meant, I suppose, that he would be verycareful.

  Soon they were all safely home, and Roly-Poly barked louder than ever,and almost wagged off his tail, sideways and up and down.

  "Oh, how wonderful!" cried Aunt Lolly when she heard the story. "Iknew something would happen. Something wonderful has happened."

  And so it had. And it was really wonderful that Roly had floated downbeneath the ice, and that the engineer had come along just in time toget him out alive.

  And so Roly came back, just as I told you he would. In a few weeks theblack spots wore off him, and he was all white again, and as livelyand frisky as ever, hiding anything he could find, and barking andwagging his tail like anything.

  "Won't all the boys and girls be surprised when they see our dog backagain?" asked Mab.

  "I guess they will," agreed Hal. "It is just like a fairy story; isn'tit?"

  "Oh, it's better than a fairy story, for it's true!" exclaimed Mab."If it was a fairy story we would wake up and Roly-Poly wouldn't behere. Oh! I am so glad!"

  Hal and Mab had many more days of skating on the pond with Daddy;Blake. And then, one morning, when they woke up, the ground was deeplycovered with white snow.