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"What are those huge buildings on the small island?" asked Ted, as the steamer wound through the shallows. "Ice-houses," said his father. "Before people learned to manufacture ice, immense cargoes were shipped from here to as far south as San Francisco." "It was fun to see them go fishing for ice from the steamer when we came up to Skaguay," said Ted.
In hot summers, the supplies of the artificial ice-houses fail; and then the hotel-keepers have recourse to the stores laid up for them by nature in the Glacières of S. Georges and S. Livres.
"Zeitzer, you must have made this grand discovery in your dreams. There is no Nile up this way, and our water-skins are almost dry. We had better return and follow up the course of the river where we left it. If we again fail, I shall return to Egypt to carry out my plan for converting the Pyramids into ice-houses.
The thin crusts of ice thus obtained are broken into small pieces, a little water is poured over them, and the whole is put into the ice-houses, which are also lined with straw. This mode of obtaining ice is already practised in Benares. Mr. Hamilton was so obliging as to make the arrangements for the continuance of my journey.
Italians, on the other hand, have so little winter that when the cold does come it is completely their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so grateful in July are simply ice-houses in December. The large windows are full of crevices and draughts. An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire from his knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty as Italian rooms commonly are.
An account of it is to be found in Sir Charles Lyell's 'Elements of Geology. It appears that the summer and autumn of 1828 were so hot, that the artificial ice-houses of Catania and the adjoining parts of Sicily failed.
When he rode about the country he used to consider with admiration the splendid stables which the great construct for the reception of their horses, their ice-houses, temples, hermitages, grottoes, and all the apparatus of modern vanity.
The French Encyclopædia relates that M. Hassenfratz saw ice served up at table at Chambéry which broke into hexagonal prisms; and when he was shown the ice-houses where it was stored, he found considerable blocks of ice containing hexahedral prisms terminated by corresponding pyramids. In vol. xv.
They are sawn most carefully, the dimensions being about two feet each way; rope handles are then frozen into the blocks for facility of movement, and the cubes are stored in ice-houses until the summer, by which time they have lost almost half their original weight.
The only place I have ever known them regularly to nest in living trees is in the deserts of Arizona, where the saguaro or "tree cactus" is about the only tree large enough to be employed for such a purpose. In the Northern States Flickers sometimes chisel holes through the weatherboarding of ice-houses and make cavities for their eggs in the tightly packed sawdust within.
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