We had also to be pretty careful, for it was over deep black water, and a cake when nearly sawed across is likely to break off suddenly underfoot.
Hauling out the cakes with tongs, too, is somewhat hazardous on a slippery ice margin.

We beveled off a kind of inclined "slip" at one end of the open water, and cut heel holes in the ice beside it, so that we might stand more securely as we pulled the cakes out of the water.
For those first few days we had bright, calm weather, not very cold; we got out five hundred cakes and drew them home to the ice-house without accident.
The hardship came the next week, when several of our neighbors--who always kept an eye on the old Squire's farming, and liked to follow his lead--were beset by an ambition to start ice-houses.

None of them had either experience or tools.

They wanted us to cut the ice for them.
We thought that was asking rather too much.

Thereupon fourteen or fifteen of them offered us two cents a cake to cut a year's supply for each of them.
Now no one will ever get very rich cutting ice, sixteen inches thick, at two cents a cake.