Читать книгу The Ice Crop: How to Harvest, Store, Ship and Use Ice онлайн

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Pen Picture of a Modern Ice Harvest. (See .)—Viewed from an eminence on the shore, a pretty and engaging scene is often presented at an ice house in the country, during the harvest. The clear sunlight flooding the quiet landscape discloses here and there a snug farmhouse sheltered among the hills, and surrounded with trees and shrubs, rivaling, in their soft downy draperies of spotless white and brilliant pearls, their vernal beauty when joyous spring has clothed their boughs with fragrant blossoms and emerald leaves. The broad stream or lake, ice-locked and still, stretches away to the distance, a level and unbroken plain; its farther shore dwindling away until lost to view, presents a delicately traced outline of forest and field against the horizon. The near by shore stands out clear cut and bold of outline, but quiet and deserted. Nothing in the aspect of nature denotes activity or invites the attack of man by a display of treasure.

Stepping to the brink of the hill near the shore, a new scene breaks upon the view. At the foot of the hill stands a huge ice house, its shore side serried with galleries along the entire front, with inclined ways extending from the water to the top of the house, and a connecting bridge or runway between each gallery and the incline. Alongside of the incline is discovered a power-house and tool-room, and at a little distance large barns and dwellings. From the foot of the incline leading out into the lake is seen a dark line, which branches out and becomes a large blot on the clear white surface. A closer inspection reveals an animated scene, of men armed with strange weapons attacking, with great vigor, fields of ice, which they detach from the main surface, and on which they navigate the open water, already stripped of its frozen crystals. All around are seen teams and horses drawing huge loads of snow to the distant shores, plows and markers, crossing and recrossing the cleared surface, and long lines of ice blocks, which are being floated along the channels to the incline, where the puffing engine imparts motion to swiftly gliding, endless chains, which catch up the waiting cakes and whisk them away up the incline and into the ice house, looking as though they were endowed with life-motion and were traveling of their own volition.