There were no ice-houses.

The use of ice for keeping provisions or cooling water was unknown.
My father was well-to-do, and his household lived certainly as well as any family in the town of Concord, where I was born.

I have no doubt a Roman boy two hundred years before Christ, or an Athenian boy four hundred years before Christ, lived quite as well as I did, if not better.
The boy got up in the morning and dressed himself in a room into which the cold air came through the cracks in the window.
If the temperature were twenty degrees below zero outside, it was very little higher inside.

If he were big enough to make the fires, he made his way down-stairs in the dark of a winter morning and found, if the fire had been properly raked up the night before, a few coals in the ashes in the kitchen fireplace.

The last person who went to bed the night before had done exactly what Homer describes as the practice in Ulysses's time, when he tells us that Ulysses covered himself with leaves after he was washed ashore in Phaiakia: "He lay down in the midst, heaping the fallen leaves above, as a man hides a brand in a dark bed of ashes, at some outlying farm where neighbors are not near, hoarding a seed of fire to save his seeking elsewhere." But first he must get a light.