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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dr. Grenfell's Parish, by Norman Duncan
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Dr. Grenfell's Parish
+       The Deep Sea Fisherman
+
+Author: Norman Duncan
+
+Release Date: March 13, 2012 [EBook #39130]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
+
+
+
+
+
+_DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH_
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "A DOCTOR ... THE PROPHET AND CHAMPION OF A PEOPLE"]
+
+
+
+
+_Dr. Grenfell's Parish_
+
+_The Deep Sea Fishermen_
+
+_By_
+
+_NORMAN DUNCAN_
+
+_Author of_
+
+_"Doctor Luke of the Labrador"_
+
+_New York Chicago Toronto_
+
+_Fleming H. Revell Company_
+
+_London and Edinburgh_
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1905, by
+
+FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
+
+THIRD EDITION
+
+New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
+Chicago: 63 Washington Street
+Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W
+London: 21 Paternoster Square
+Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
+
+
+
+
+_TO_
+
+_THE CREW OF THE "STRATHCONA"_
+
+Henry Bartlett,      _Skipper_
+Munden Clark,        _Second Hand_
+William Percy,       _First Engineer_
+John Scott,          _Second Engineer_
+Archie Butler,       _Hospital Hand_
+James Hiscock,       _Cook_
+Alec Sims,           _Ship's Boy_
+
+
+
+
+_TO THE READER_
+
+
+This book pretends to no literary excellence; it has a far better
+reason for existence--a larger justification. Its purpose is to spread
+the knowledge of the work of Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell, of the Royal
+National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen, at work on the coasts of
+Newfoundland and Labrador; and to describe the character and condition
+of the folk whom he seeks to help. The man and the mission are worthy
+of sympathetic interest; worthy, too, of unqualified approbation, of
+support of every sort. Dr. Grenfell is indefatigable, devoted, heroic;
+he is more and even better than that--he is a sane and efficient
+worker. Frankly, the author believes that the reader would do a good
+deed by contributing to the maintenance and development of the
+doctor's beneficent undertakings; and regrets that the man and his
+work are presented in this inadequate way and by so incapable a hand.
+The author is under obligation to the editors of _Harper's Magazine_,
+of _The World's Work_, and of _Outing_ for permission to reprint the
+contributed papers which, in some part, go to make up the volume. He
+wishes also to protest that Dr. Grenfell is not the hero of a certain
+work of fiction dealing with life on the Labrador coast. Some unhappy
+misunderstanding has arisen on this point. The author wishes to make
+it plain that "Doctor Luke" was _not_ drawn from Dr. Grenfell.
+
+                                                                N. D.
+
+_College Campus,_
+  _Washington, Pennsylvania, January 25, 1905._
+
+
+
+
+_CONTENTS_
+
+
+I.    The Doctor                     11
+II.   A Round of Bleak Coasts        18
+III.  Ships in Peril                 26
+IV.   Desperate Need                 37
+V.    A Helping Hand                 48
+VI.   Faith and Duty                 55
+VII.  The Liveyere                   67
+VIII. With the Fleet                 83
+IX.   On the French Shore           103
+X.    Some Outport Folk             110
+XI.   Winter Practice               132
+XII.  The Champion                  146
+
+
+
+
+_LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS_
+
+
+"A Doctor ... the Prophet and Champion of a People"    _Title_
+"It is an Evil Coast"                                       20
+"Bound North"                                               30
+"A Turf Hut"                                                44
+"Set Sail from Great Yarmouth Harbour for Labrador"         50
+"Appeared with a Little Steam-launch, the Princess May"     55
+"The Hospital Ship, Strathcona"                             65
+"The Labrador 'Liveyere'"                                   73
+"At Indian Harbour"                                         86
+"Set the Traps in the Open Sea"                             93
+"The Bully-boat Becomes a Home"                            101
+"The Whitewashed Cottages on the Hills"                    111
+"Toil"                                                     122
+"The Hospital at Battle Harbour"                           133
+"The Doctor on a Winter's Journey"                         144
+"A Crew Quite Capable of Taking You into It"               150
+
+
+
+
+_Dr. Grenfell's Parish_
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+_THE DOCTOR_
+
+
+Doctor Wilfred T. Grenfell is the young Englishman who, for the love
+of God, practices medicine on the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador.
+Other men have been moved to heroic deeds by the same high motive, but
+the professional round, I fancy, is quite out of the common; indeed,
+it may be that in all the world there is not another of the sort. It
+extends from Cape John of Newfoundland around Cape Norman and into the
+Strait of Belle Isle, and from Ungava Bay and Cape Chidley of the
+Labrador southward far into the Gulf of St. Lawrence--two thousand
+miles of bitterly inhospitable shore: which a man in haste must sail
+with his life in his hands. The folk are for the most part isolated
+and desperately wretched--the shore fishermen of the remoter
+Newfoundland coasts, the Labrador "liveyeres," the Indians of the
+forbidding interior, the Esquimaux of the far north. It is to such as
+these that the man gives devoted and heroic service--not for gain;
+there is no gain to be got in those impoverished places: merely for
+the love of God.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+I once went ashore in a little harbour of the northeast coast of
+Newfoundland. It was a place most unimportant--and it was just beyond
+the doctor's round. The sea sullenly confronted it, hills overhung it,
+and a scrawny wilderness flanked the hills; the ten white cottages of
+the place gripped the dripping rocks as for dear life. And down the
+path there came an old fisherman to meet the stranger.
+
+"Good-even, zur," said he.
+
+"Good-evening."
+
+He waited for a long time. Then, "Be you a doctor, zur?" he asked.
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Noa? Isn't you? Now, I was thinkin' maybe you might be. But you
+isn't, you says?"
+
+"Sorry--but, no; really, I'm not."
+
+"Well, zur," he persisted, "I was thinkin' you might be, when I seed
+you comin' ashore. They _is_ a doctor on this coast," he added, "but
+he's sixty mile along shore. 'Tis a wonderful expense t' have un up.
+This here harbour isn't able. An' you isn't a doctor, you says? Is you
+sure, zur?"
+
+There was unhappily no doubt about it.
+
+"I was thinkin' you might be," he went on, wistfully, "when I seed you
+comin' ashore. But perhaps you might know something about doctorin'?
+Noa?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"I was thinkin', now, that you might. 'Tis my little girl that's sick.
+Sure, none of us knows what's the matter with she. Woan't you come up
+an' see she, zur? Perhaps you might do something--though you isn't--a
+doctor."
+
+The little girl was lying on the floor--on a ragged quilt, in a
+corner. She was a fair child--a little maid of seven. Her eyes were
+deep blue, wide, and fringed with long, heavy lashes. Her hair was
+flaxen, abundant, all tangled and curly. Indeed, she was a winsome
+little thing!
+
+"I'm thinkin' she'll be dyin' soon," said the mother. "Sure, she's
+wonderful swelled in the legs. We been waitin' for a doctor t' come,
+an' we kind o' thought you was one."
+
+"How long have you waited?"
+
+"'Twas in April she was took. She've been lyin' there ever since. 'Tis
+near August, now, I'm thinkin'."
+
+"They was a doctor here two year ago," said the man. "He come by
+chance," he added, "like you."
+
+"Think they'll be one comin' soon?" the woman asked.
+
+I took the little girl's hand. It was dry and hot. She did not
+smile--nor was she afraid. Her fingers closed upon the hand she held.
+She was a blue-eyed, winsome little maid; but pain had driven all the
+sweet roguery out of her face.
+
+"Does you think she'll die, zur?" asked the woman, anxiously.
+
+I did not know.
+
+"Sure, zur," said the man, trying to smile, "'tis wonderful queer, but
+I _sure_ thought you was a doctor, when I seed you comin' ashore."
+
+"But you isn't?" the woman pursued, still hopefully. "Is you sure you
+couldn't do nothin'? Is you noa kind of a doctor, at all? We
+doan't--we doan't--want she t' die!"
+
+In the silence--so long and deep a silence--melancholy shadows crept
+in from the desolation without.
+
+"I wisht you _was_ a doctor," said the man. "I--_wisht--you--was_!"
+
+He was crying.
+
+"They need," thought I, "a mission-doctor in these parts."
+
+And the next day--in the harbour beyond--I first heard of Grenfell. In
+that place they said they would send _him_ to the little maid who lay
+dying; they assured me, indeed, that he would make haste, when he came
+that way: which would be, perhaps, they thought, in "'long about a
+month." Whether or not the doctor succoured the child I do not know;
+but I have never forgotten this first impression of his work--the
+conviction that it was a good work for a man to be about.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Subsequently I learned that Dr. Grenfell was the superintendent of the
+Newfoundland and Labrador activities of the Royal National Mission to
+Deep Sea Fishermen, an English organization, with a religious and
+medical work already well-established on the North Sea, and a medical
+mission then in process of development on the North Atlantic coast.
+Two years later he discovered himself to be a robust, hearty Saxon,
+strong, indefatigable, devoted, jolly; a doctor, a parson by times,
+something of a sportsman when occasion permitted, a master-mariner, a
+magistrate, the director of certain commercial enterprises designed to
+"help the folk help themselves"--the prophet and champion, indeed, of
+a people: and a man very much in love with life.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+_A ROUND of BLEAK COASTS_
+
+
+The coast of Labrador, which, in number of miles, forms the larger
+half of the doctor's round, is forbidding, indeed--naked, rugged,
+desolate, lying sombre in a mist. It is of weather-worn gray rock,
+broken at intervals by long ribs of black. In part it is low and
+ragged, slowly rising, by way of bare slopes and starved forest, to
+broken mountain ranges, which lie blue and bold in the inland waste.
+Elsewhere it rears from the edge of the sea in stupendous cliffs and
+lofty, rugged hills. There is no inviting stretch of shore the length
+of it--no sandy beach, no line of shingle, no grassy bank; the sea
+washes a thousand miles of jagged rock. Were it not for the
+harbours--innumerable and snugly sheltered from the winds and ground
+swell of the open--there would be no navigating the waters of that
+region. The Strait Shore is buoyed, lighted, minutely charted. The
+reefs and currents and tickles[1] and harbours are all known. A
+northeast gale, to be sure, raises a commotion, and fog and drift-ice
+add something to the chance of disaster; but, as they say, from one
+peril there are two ways of escape to three sheltered places. To the
+north, however, where the doctor makes his way, the coast is best
+sailed on the plan of the skipper of the old _Twelve Brothers_.
+
+"You don't cotch _me_ meddlin' with no land!" said he.
+
+Past the Dead Islands, Snug Harbour, Domino Run, Devil's Lookout and
+the Quaker's Hat--beyond Johnny Paul's Rock and the Wolves, Sandwich
+Bay, Tumbledown Dick, Indian Harbour, and the White Cockade--past Cape
+Harrigan, the Farmyard Islands and the Hen and Chickens--far north to
+the great, craggy hills and strange peoples of Kikkertadsoak,
+Scoralik, Tunnulusoak, Nain, Okak, and, at last, to Cape Chidley
+itself--northward, every crooked mile of the way, bold headlands, low
+outlying islands, sunken reefs, tides, fogs, great winds and snow make
+hard sailing of it. It is an evil coast, ill-charted where charted at
+all; some part of the present-day map is based upon the guess-work of
+the eighteenth century navigators. The doctor, like the skippers of
+the fishing-craft, must sometimes sail by guess and hearsay, by
+recollection, and old rhymes.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The gusts and great waves of open water--of the free, wide sea, I
+mean, over which a ship may safely drive while the weather exhausts
+its evil mood--are menace enough for the stoutest heart. But the
+Labrador voyage is inshore--a winding course among the islands, or a
+straight one from headland to headland, of a coast off which reefs lie
+thick: low-lying, jagged ledges, washed by the sea in heavy weather;
+barren hills, rising abruptly--and all isolated--from safe water;
+sunken rocks, disclosed, upon approach, only by the green swirl above
+them. They are countless--scattered everywhere, hidden and disclosed.
+They lie in the mouths of harbours, they lie close to the coast, they
+lie offshore; they run twenty miles out to sea. Here is no plain
+sailing; the skipper must be sure of the way--or choose it gingerly:
+else the hidden rock will inevitably "pick him up."
+
+[Illustration: "IT IS AN EVIL COAST"]
+
+Recently the doctor _was_ "picked up."
+
+"Oh, yes," says he, with interest. "An uncharted rock. It took two of
+the three blades of the propeller. But, really, you'd be surprised to
+know how well the ship got along with one!"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+To know the submerged rocks of one harbour and the neighbouring coast,
+however evil the place, is small accomplishment. The Newfoundland lad
+of seven years would count himself his father's shame if he failed in
+so little. High tide and low tide, quiet sea and heavy swell, he will
+know where he can take the punt--the depth of water, to an inch, which
+overlies the danger spots. But here are a hundred harbours--a thousand
+miles of coast--with reefs and islands scattered like dust the length
+of it. The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own
+back yard--not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the
+headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise
+of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts. A flash
+of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place:
+the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It is thus, often, that
+the doctor gets along.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+You may chart rocks, and beware of them; but--it is a proverb on the
+coast--"there's no chart for icebergs." The Labrador current is
+charged with them--hard, dead-white glacier ice from the Arctic:
+massive bergs, innumerable, all the while shifting with tide and
+current and wind. What with floes and bergs--vast fields of
+drift-ice--the way north in the spring is most perilous. The same
+bergs--widely scattered, diminished in number, dwarfed by the milder
+climate--give the transatlantic passenger evil dreams: somewhere in
+the night, somewhere in the mist, thinks he, they may lie; and he
+shudders. The skipper of the Labrador craft _knows_ that they lie
+thick around him: there is no surmise; when the night fell, when the
+fog closed in, there were a hundred to be counted from the masthead.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Violent winds are always to be feared--swift, overwhelming hurricanes:
+winds that catch the unwary. They are not frequent; but they _do_
+blow--will again blow, no man can tell when. In such a gale, forty
+vessels were driven on a lee shore; in another, eighty were wrecked
+overnight--two thousand fishermen cast away, the coast littered with
+splinters of ships--and, once (it is but an incident), a schooner was
+torn from her anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet above the
+high-water mark. These are exceptional storms; the common Labrador
+gale is not so violent, but evil enough in its own way. It is a
+northeaster, of which the barometer more often than not gives fair
+warning; day after day it blows, cold, wet, foggy, dispiriting,
+increasing in violence, subsiding, returning again, until courage and
+strength are both worn out.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reefs, drift-ice, wind and sea--and over all the fog: thick,
+wide-spread, persistent, swift in coming, mysterious in movement; it
+compounds the dangers. It blinds men--they curse it, while they grope
+along: a desperate business, indeed, thus to run by guess where
+positive knowledge of the way merely mitigates the peril. There are
+days when the fog lies like a thick blanket on the face of the sea,
+hiding the head-sails from the man at the wheel; it is night on deck,
+and broad day--with the sun in a blue sky--at the masthead; the
+schooners are sometimes steered by a man aloft. The _Always Loaded_,
+sixty tons and bound home with a cargo that did honour to her name,
+struck one of the outlying islands so suddenly, so violently, that the
+lookout in the bow, who had been peering into the mist, was pitched
+headlong into the surf. The _Daughter_, running blind with a fair,
+light wind--she had been lost for a day--ran full tilt into a cliff;
+the men ran forward from the soggy gloom of the after-deck
+into--bright sunshine at the bow! It is the fog that wrecks ships.
+
+"Oh, I runned her ashore," says the castaway skipper. "Thick? Why,
+_sure_, 'twas thick!"
+
+So the men who sail that coast hate fog, fear it, avoid it when they
+can, which is seldom; they are not afraid of wind and sea, but there
+are times when they shake in their sea-boots, if the black fog catches
+them out of harbour.
+
+[Footnote 1: A "tickle" is a narrow passage to a harbour or between
+two islands.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+_SHIPS in PERIL_
+
+
+It is to be remarked that a wreck on the Labrador coast excites no
+wide surprise. Never a season passes but some craft are cast away. But
+that is merely the fortune of sailing those waters--a fortune which
+the mission-doctor accepts with a glad heart: it provides him with an
+interesting succession of adventures; life is not tame. Most men--I
+hesitate to say all--have been wrecked; every man, woman, and child
+who has sailed the Labrador has narrowly escaped, at least. And the
+fashion of that escape is sometimes almost incredible.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The schooner _All's Well_ (which is a fictitious name) was helpless in
+the wind and sea and whirling snow of a great blizzard. At dusk she
+was driven inshore--no man knew where. Strange cliffs loomed in the
+snow ahead; breakers--they were within stone's throw--flashed and
+thundered to port and starboard; the ship was driving swiftly into the
+surf. When she was fairly upon the rocks, Skipper John, then a hand
+aboard (it was he who told me the story), ran below and tumbled into
+his bunk, believing it to be the better place to drown in.
+
+"Well, lads," said he to the men in the forecastle, "we got t' go this
+time. 'Tis no use goin' on deck."
+
+But the ship drove through a tickle no wider than twice her beam and
+came suddenly into the quiet water of a harbour!
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sealing-schooner _Right and Tight_ struck on the Fish Rocks off
+Cape Charles in the dusk of a northeast gale. It is a jagged, black
+reef, outlying and isolated; the seas wash over it in heavy weather.
+It was a bitter gale; there was ice in the sea, and the wind was wild
+and thick with snow; she was driving before it--wrecked, blind,
+utterly lost. The breakers flung her on the reef, broke her back,
+crunched her, swept the splinters on. Forty-two men were of a sudden
+drowned in the sea beyond; but the skipper was left clinging to the
+rock in a swirl of receding water.
+
+"Us seed un there in the marnin'," said the old man of Cape Charles
+who told me the story. "He were stickin' to it like a mussel, with the
+sea breakin' right over un! 'Cod! he were!"
+
+He laughed and shook his head; that was a tribute to the strength and
+courage with which the man on the reef had withstood the icy breakers
+through the night.
+
+"Look! us couldn't get near un," he went on. "'Twas clear enough t'
+see, but the wind was blowin' wonderful, an' the seas was too big for
+the skiff. Sure, I _knows_ that; for us tried it.
+
+"'Leave us build a fire!' says my woman. 'Leave us build a fire on the
+head!' says she. ''Twill let un know they's folk lookin' on.'
+
+"'Twas a wonderful big fire us set; an' it kep' us warm, so us set
+there all day watchin' the skipper o' the _Right an' Tight_ on Fish
+Rocks. The big seas jerked un loose an' flung un about, an' many a one
+washed right over un; but nar a sea could carry un off. 'Twas a
+wonderful sight t' see un knocked off his feet, an' scramble round an'
+cotch hold somewheres else. 'Cod! it were--the way that man stuck t'
+them slippery rocks all day long!"
+
+He laughed again--not heartlessly; it was the only way in which he
+could express his admiration.
+
+"We tried the skiff again afore dark," he continued; "but 'twasn't no
+use. The seas was too big. Sure, _he_ knowed that so well as we. So us
+had t' leave un there all night.
+
+"'He'll never be there in the marnin',' says my woman.
+
+"'You wait,' says I, 'an' you'll see. I'm thinkin' he will.'
+
+"An' he was, zur--right there on Fish Rocks, same as ever; still
+stickin' on like the toughest ol' mussel ever you tasted. Sure, I had
+t' rub me eyes when I looked; but 'twas he, never fear--'twas he,
+stickin' there like a mussel. But there was no gettin' un then. Us
+watched un all that day. 'Twas dark afore us got un ashore.
+
+"'You come nigh it _that_ time,' says I.
+
+"'I'll have t' come a sight nigher,' says he, 'afore _I_ goes!'"
+
+The man had been on the reef more than forty-eight hours!
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Army Lass_, bound north, was lost in the fog. They hove her to.
+All hands knew that she lay somewhere near the coast. The skipper
+needed a sight of the rocks--just a glimpse of some headland or
+island--to pick the course. It was important that he should have it.
+There was an iceberg floating near; it was massive; it appeared to be
+steady--and the sea was quiet. From the top of it, he thought (the fog
+was dense and seemed to be lying low), he might see far and near. His
+crew put him on the ice with the quarter-boat and then hung off a bit.
+He clambered up the side of the berg. Near the summit be had to cut
+his foothold with an axe. This was unfortunate; for he gave the great
+white mass one blow too many. It split under his feet. He fell
+headlong into the widening crevice. But he was apparently not a whit
+the worse for it when his boat's crew picked him up.
+
+[Illustration: "BOUND NORTH"]
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+A schooner--let her be called the _Good Fortune_--running through
+dense fog, with a fair, high wind and all sail set, struck a "twin"
+iceberg bow on. She was wrecked in a flash: her jib-boom was rammed
+into her forecastle; her bows were stove in; her topmast snapped and
+came crashing to the deck. Then she fell away from the ice; whereupon
+the wind caught her, turned her about, and drove her, stern foremost,
+into a narrow passage which lay between the two towering sections of
+the "twin." She scraped along, striking the ice on either side; and
+with every blow, down came fragments from above.
+
+"It rained chunks," said the old skipper who told me the story. "You
+couldn't tell, look! what minute you'd get knocked on the head."
+
+The falling ice made great havoc with the deck-works; the boats were
+crushed; the "house" was stove in; the deck was littered with ice. But
+the _Good Fortune_ drove safely through, was rigged with makeshift
+sails, made harbour, was refitted by all hands--the Labradormen can
+build a ship with an axe--and continued her voyage.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have said that the Newfoundlanders occasionally navigate by means of
+old rhymes; and this brings me to the case of Zachariah, the skipper
+of the _Heavenly Rest_. He was a Newf'un'lander. Neither wind, fog nor
+a loppy sea could turn his blood to water. He was a Newf'un'lander of
+the hardshell breed. So he sailed the _Heavenly Rest_ without a chart.
+To be sure, he favoured the day for getting along, but he ran through
+the night when he was crowding south, and blithely took his chance
+with islands of ice and rock alike. He had some faith in a "telltale,"
+had Zachariah, but he scorned charts. It was his boast that if he
+could not carry the harbours and headlands and shallows of five
+hundred miles of hungry coast in his head he should give up the
+_Heavenly Rest_ and sail a paddle-punt for a living. It was well that
+he could--well for the ship and the crew and the folk at home. For, at
+the time of which I write, the _Rest_, too light in ballast to
+withstand a gusty breeze, was groping through the fog for harbour from
+a gale which threatened a swift descent. It was "thick as bags," with
+a rising wind running in from the sea, and the surf breaking and
+hissing within hearing to leeward.
+
+"We be handy t' Hollow Harbour," said Zachariah.
+
+"Is you sure, skipper?" asked the cook.
+
+"Sure," said Zachariah.
+
+The _Heavenly Rest_ was in desperate case. She was running
+in--pursuing an unfaltering course for an unfamiliar, rocky shore. The
+warning of the surf sounded in every man's ears. It was imperative
+that her true position should soon be determined. The skipper was
+perched far forward, peering through the fog for a sight of the coast.
+
+"Sure, an' I hopes," said the man at the wheel, "that she woan't break
+her nose on a rock afore the ol' man sees un."
+
+"Joe Bett's P'int!" exclaimed the skipper.
+
+Dead ahead, and high in the air, a mass of rock loomed through the
+mist. The skipper had recognized it in a flash. He ran aft and took
+the wheel. The _Heavenly Rest_ sheered off and ran to sea.
+
+"We'll run in t' Hollow Harbour," said the skipper.
+
+"Has you ever been there?" said the man who had surrendered the wheel.
+
+"Noa, b'y," the skipper answered, "but I'll get there, whatever."
+
+The nose of the _Heavenly Rest_ was turned shoreward. Sang the
+skipper, humming it to himself in a rasping sing-song:
+
+  "When Joe Bett's P'int you is abreast,
+  Dane's Rock bears due west.
+  West-nor'west you must steer,
+  'Til Brimstone Head do appear.
+
+  "The tickle's narrow, not very wide;
+  The deepest water's on the starboard side
+  When in the harbour you is shot,
+  Four fathoms you has got."
+
+The old song was chart enough for Skipper Zachariah. Three times the
+_Heavenly Rest_ ran in and out. Then she sighted Dane's Rock, which
+bore due west, true enough. West-nor'west was the course she followed,
+running blindly through the fog and heeling to the wind. Brimstone
+Head appeared in due time; and in due time the rocks of the
+tickle--that narrow entrance to the harbour--appeared in vague,
+forbidding form to port and starboard. The schooner ran to the
+starboard for the deeper water. Into the harbour she shot; and there
+they dropped anchor, caring not at all whether the water was four or
+forty fathoms, for it was deep enough. Through the night the gale
+tickled the topmasts, but the ship rode smoothly at her anchors, and
+Skipper Zachariah's stentorian sleep was not disturbed by any sudden
+call to duty.
+
+And the doctor of the Deep Sea Mission has had many a similar
+experience.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+_DESPERATE NEED_
+
+
+It was to these rough waters that Dr. Grenfell came when the need of
+the folk reached his ears and touched his heart. Before that, in the
+remoter parts of Newfoundland and on the coast of Labrador there were
+no doctors. The folk depended for healing upon traditional cures, upon
+old women who worked charms, upon remedies ingeniously devised to meet
+the need of the moment, upon deluded persons who prescribed medicines
+of the most curious description, upon a rough-and-ready surgery of
+their own, in which the implements of the kitchen and of the
+splitting-stage served a useful purpose. For example, there was a
+misled old fellow who set himself up as a healer in a lonely cove of
+the Newfoundland coast, where he lived a hermit, verily believing, it
+may be, in the glory of his call and in the blessed efficacy of his
+ministrations; his cure for consumption--it was a tragic failure, in
+one case, at least--was a bull's heart, dried and powdered and
+administered with faith and regularity. Elsewhere there was a man,
+stricken with a mortal ailment, who, upon the recommendation of a
+kindly neighbour, regularly dosed himself with an ill-flavoured liquid
+obtained by boiling cast-off pulley-blocks in water. There was also a
+father who most hopefully attempted to cure his little lad of
+diphtheria by wrapping his throat with a split herring; but,
+unhappily, as he has said, "the wee feller choked hisself t' death,"
+notwithstanding. There was another father--a man of grim, heroic
+disposition--whose little daughter chanced to freeze her feet to the
+very bone in midwinter; when he perceived that a surgical operation
+could no longer be delayed, he cut them off with an axe.
+
+An original preventative of sea-boils--with which the fishermen are
+cruelly afflicted upon the hands and wrists in raw weather--was
+evolved by a frowsy-headed old Labradorman of serious parts.
+
+"_I_ never has none," said he, in the fashion of superior fellows.
+
+"No?"
+
+"Nar a one. No, _zur_! Not _me_!"
+
+A glance of interested inquiry elicited no response. It but prolonged
+a large silence.
+
+"Have you never _had_ a sea-boil?" with the note and sharp glance of
+incredulity.
+
+"Not me. Not since I got my cure."
+
+"And what might that cure be?"
+
+"Well, zur," was the amazing reply, "I cuts my nails on a Monday."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It must be said, however, that the Newfoundland government did provide
+a physician--of a sort. Every summer he was sent north with the
+mail-boat, which made not more than six trips, touching here and there
+at long intervals, and, of a hard season, failing altogether to reach
+the farthest ports. While the boat waited--an hour, or a half, as
+might be--the doctor went ashore to cure the sick, if he chanced to be
+in the humour; otherwise the folk brought the sick aboard, where they
+were painstakingly treated or not, as the doctor's humour went. The
+government seemed never to inquire too minutely into the
+qualifications and character of its appointee. The incumbent for many
+years--the folk thank God that he is dead--was an inefficient,
+ill-tempered, cruel man; if not the very man himself, he was of a kind
+with the Newfoundland physician who ran a flag of warning to his
+masthead when he set out to get very drunk.
+
+The mail-boat dropped anchor one night in a far-away harbour of the
+Labrador, where there was desperate need of a doctor to ease a man's
+pain. They had waited a long time, patiently, day after day. I am
+told; and when at last the mail-boat came, the man's skipper put out
+in glad haste to fetch the government physician.
+
+"He've turned in," they told him aboard.
+
+What did _that_ matter? The skipper roused the doctor.
+
+"We've a sick man ashore, zur," said he, "an' he wants you t'
+come----"
+
+"What!" roared the doctor. "Think I'm going to turn out this time of
+night?"
+
+"Sure, zur," stammered the astounded skipper. "I--I--s'pose so. He's
+very sick, zur. He's coughin'----"
+
+"Let him cough himself to death!" said the doctor.
+
+Turn out? Not he! Rather, he turned over in his warm berth. It is to
+be assumed that the sick man died in pain; it is to be assumed, too,
+that the physician continued a tranquil slumber, for the experience
+was not exceptional.
+
+"Let 'em die!" he had said more than once.
+
+The government had provided for the transportation of sick fishermen
+from the Labrador coast to their homes in Newfoundland; these men were
+of the great Newfoundland fleet of cod-fishing schooners, which fish
+the Labrador seas in the summer. It needed only the doctor's word to
+get the boon. Once a fisherman brought his consumptive son aboard--a
+young lad, with but a few weeks of life left. The boy wanted his
+mother, who was at home in Newfoundland.
+
+"Ay, he's fair _sick_ for his mother," said the father to the doctor.
+"I'm askin' you, zur, t' take un home on the mail-boat."
+
+The doctor was in a perverse mood that day. He would not take the boy.
+
+"Sure, zur," said the fisherman, "the schooner's not goin' 'til fall,
+an' I've no money, an' the lad's dyin'."
+
+But still the doctor would not.
+
+"I'm thinkin', zur," said the fisherman, steadily, "that you're not
+quite knowin' that the lad wants t' see his mother afore he dies."
+
+The doctor laughed.
+
+"We'll have a laugh at _you_," cried the indignant fisherman, "when
+_you_ comes t' die!"
+
+Then he cursed the doctor most heartily and took his son ashore. He
+was right--they did have a laugh at the doctor; the whole coast might
+have laughed when he came to die. Being drunk on a stormy night, he
+fell down the companion way and broke his neck.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Deep in the bays and up the rivers south of Hamilton Inlet, which is
+itself rather heavily timbered, there is wood to be had for the
+cutting; but "down t' Chidley"--which is the northernmost point of the
+Labrador coast--the whole world is bare; there is neither tree nor
+shrub, shore nor inland, to grace the naked rock; the land lies bleak
+and desolate. But, once, a man lived there the year round. I don't
+know why; it is inexplicable; but I am sure that the shiftless fellow
+and his wife had never an inkling that the circumstance was otherwise
+than commonplace and reasonable; and the child, had he lived, would
+have continued to dwell there, boy and man, in faith that the earth
+was good to live in. One hard winter the man burnt all his wood long
+before the schooners came up from the lower coast. It was a desperate
+strait to come to; but I am sure that he regarded his situation with
+surprising phlegm; doubtless he slept as sound, if not as warm, as
+before. There was no more wood to be had; so he burnt the furniture,
+every stick of it, and when that was gone, began on the frame of his
+house--a turf hut, builded under a kindly cliff, sheltered somewhat
+from the winds from the frozen sea. As, rafter by rafter, the frame
+was withdrawn, he cut off the roof and folded in the turf walls; thus,
+day by day, the space within dwindled; his last fire was to consume
+the last of his shelter--which, no doubt, troubled him not at all; for
+the day was not yet come. It is an ugly story. When they were found in
+the spring, the woman lay dying on a heap of straw in a muddy
+corner--she was afflicted with hip-disease--and the house was tumbling
+about her ears; the child, new born, had long ago frozen on its
+mother's breast.
+
+[Illustration: "A TURF HUT"]
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+A doctor of the Newfoundland outports was once called to a little
+white cottage where three children lay sick of diphtheria. He was the
+family physician; that is to say, the fisherman paid him so much by
+the year for medical attendance. But the injection of antitoxin is a
+"surgical operation" and therefore not provided for by the annual fee.
+
+"This," said the doctor, "will cost you two dollars an injection,
+John."
+
+"Oh, ay, zur," was the ready reply. "I'll pay you, zur. Go on, zur!"
+
+"But you know my rule, John--no pay, no work. I can't break it for
+you, you know, or I'd have to break it for half the coast."
+
+"Oh, ay! 'Tis all right. I wants un cured. I'll pay you when I sells
+me fish."
+
+"But you know my rule, John--cash down."
+
+The fisherman had but four dollars--no more; nor could he obtain any
+more, though the doctor gave him ample time. I am sure that he loved
+his children dearly, but, unfortunately, he had no more than four
+dollars; and there was no other doctor for fifty miles up and down the
+coast.
+
+"Four dollars," said the doctor, "two children. Which ones shall it
+be, John?"
+
+Which ones? Why, of course, after all, the doctor had himself to make
+the choice. John couldn't. So the doctor chose the "handiest" ones.
+The other one died.
+
+"Well," said John, unresentfully, the day after the funeral, "I s'pose
+a doctor haves a right t' be paid for what he does. But," much
+puzzled, "'tis kind o' queer!"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is not a work of fiction. These incidents are true. I set them
+down here for the purpose of adequately showing the need of such a
+practitioner as Wilfred T. Grenfell in the sphere in which he now
+labours. My point is--that if in the more settled places, where
+physicians might be summoned, such neglect and brutality could exist,
+in what a lamentable condition were the folk of the remoter parts,
+where even money could not purchase healing! Nor are these true
+stories designed to reflect upon the regular practitioners of
+Newfoundland; nor should they create a false impression concerning
+them. I have known many noble physicians in practice there; indeed, I
+am persuaded that heroism and devotion are, perhaps, their
+distinguishing characteristics. God knows, there is little enough gain
+to be had! God knows, too, that that little is hard earned! These men
+do their work well and courageously, and as adequately as may be; it
+is on the coasts beyond that the mission-doctor labours.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+_A HELPING HAND_
+
+
+While the poor "liveyeres" and Newfoundland fishermen thus depended
+upon the mail-boat doctor and their own strange inventions for relief,
+Wilfred Grenfell, this well-born, Oxford-bred young Englishman, was
+walking the London hospitals. He was athletic, adventurous, dogged,
+unsentimental, merry, kind; moreover--and most happily--he was used to
+the sea, and he loved it. It chanced one night that he strayed into
+the Tabernacle in East London, where D. L. Moody, the American
+evangelist, was preaching. When he came out he had resolved to make
+his religion "practical." There was nothing violent in this--no
+fevered, ill-judged determination to martyr himself at all costs. It
+was a quiet resolve to make the best of his life--which he would have
+done at any rate, I think, for he was a young Englishman of good
+breeding and the finest impulses. At once he cast about for "some way
+in which he could satisfy the aspirations of a young medical man, and
+combine with this a desire for adventure and definite Christian work."
+
+I had never before met a missionary of that frank type. "Why," I
+exclaimed to him, off the coast of Labrador, not long ago, "you seem
+to _like_ this sort of life!"
+
+We were aboard the mission steamer, bound north under full steam and
+all sail. He had been in feverish haste to reach the northern
+harbours, where, as he knew, the sick were watching for his coming.
+The fair wind, the rush of the little steamer on her way, pleased him.
+
+"Oh," said he, somewhat impatiently, "_I'm_ not a martyr."
+
+So he found what he sought. After applying certain revolutionary ideas
+to Sunday-school work in the London slums, in which a horizontal bar
+and a set of boxing-gloves for a time held equal place with the Bible
+and the hymn-book, he joined the staff of the Royal National Mission
+to Deep Sea Fishermen, and established the medical mission to the
+fishermen of the North Sea. When that work was organized--when the
+fight was gone out of it--he sought a harder task; he is of that type,
+then extraordinary but now familiar, which finds no delight where
+there is no difficulty. In the spring of 1892 he set sail from Great
+Yarmouth Harbour for Labrador in a ninety-ton schooner. Since then, in
+the face of hardship, peril, and prejudice, he has, with a light heart
+and strong purpose, healed the sick, preached the Word, clothed the
+naked, fed the starving, given shelter to them that had no roof,
+championed the wronged--in all, devotedly fought evil, poverty,
+oppression, and disease; for he is bitterly intolerant of those
+things. And----
+
+"It's been jolly good fun!" says he.
+
+[Illustration: "SET SAIL FROM GREAT YARMOUTH HARBOR FOR LABRADOR"]
+
+The immediate inspiration of this work was the sermon preached in East
+London by D. L. Moody. Later in life--indeed, soon before the great
+evangelist's death--Dr. Grenfell thanked him for that sermon. "And
+what have you been doing since?" was Mr. Moody's prompt and searching
+question. "_What have you been doing since?_" Dr. Grenfell might with
+propriety and effect have placed in Mr. Moody's hands such letters as
+those which I reprint, saying: "What have I been doing since? I have
+been kept busy, sir, responding to such calls as these." Such calls as
+these:
+
+  Docter plase I whant to see you. Doeher sir have you got a
+  leg if you have Will you plase send him Down Praps he may
+  fet and you would oblig.
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Reverance dr. Grandfell. Dear sir we are expecting you hup
+  and we would like for you to come so quick as you can for my
+  dater is very sick with a very large sore under her left
+  harm we emenangin that the old is two enchis deep and tow
+  enches wide plase com as quick as you can to save life I
+  remains yours truely.
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Docker,--Please wel you send me somting for the pain in my
+  feet and what you proismed to send my little boy. Docker I
+  am almost cripple, it is up my hips, I can hardly walk. This
+  is my housban is gaining you this note from
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  To Dr. Gransfield
+
+  Dear honrabel Sir,
+
+  I would wish to ask you Sir, if you would Be pleased to give
+  me and my wife a littel poor close. I was going in the Bay
+  to cut some wood. But I am all amost blind and cant Do much
+  so if you would spear me some Sir I should Be very thankfull
+  to you Sir.
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  I got Bad splotches all over my Body and i dont know what
+  the cause of it is. Please Have you got anything for it. i
+  Have'nt got any money to Pay you now for anything But i wont
+  forget to Pay you when i gets the money.
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  doctor--i have a compleant i ham weak with wind on the chest,
+  weaknes all all over me up in my harm.
+
+                     *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Dear Dr. Grenfell.
+
+  I would like for you to Have time to come Down to my House
+  Before you leaves to go to St. Anthony. My little Girl is
+  very Bad. it seems all in Her neck. Cant Ply her Neck
+  forward if do she nearly goes in the fits, i dont know what
+  it is the matter with Her myself. But if you see Her you
+  would know what the matter with Her. Please send a Word By
+  the Bearer what gives you this note and let me know where
+  you will have time to come down to my House. i lives down
+  the Bay a Place called Berry Head.
+
+"What have you been doing since?" Dr. Grenfell has not been idle.
+There is now a mission hospital at St. Anthony, near the extreme
+northeast point of the Newfoundland coast. There is another,
+well-equipped and commodious, at Battle Harbour--a rocky island lying
+out from the Labrador coast near the Strait of Belle Isle--which is
+open the year round; when the writer was last on the coast, it was in
+charge of Dr. Cluny McPherson, a courageous young physician,
+Newfoundland-born, who went six hundred miles up the coast by dog-team
+in the dead of winter, finding shelter where he might, curing whom he
+could--everywhere seeking out those who needed him, caring not a whit,
+it appears, for the peril and hardship of the long white road. There
+is a third at Indian Harbour, half-way up the coast, which is open
+through the fishing season. It is conducted with the care and
+precision of a London hospital--admirably kept, well-ordered,
+efficient. The physician in charge is Dr. George H. Simpson--a wiry,
+keen, brave little Englishman, who goes about in an open boat,
+whatever the distance, whatever the weather; he is a man of splendid
+courage and sympathy: the fishing-folk love him for his kind heart and
+for the courage with which he responds to their every call. There is
+also the little hospital steamer _Strathcona_, in which Dr. Grenfell
+makes the round of all the coast, from the time of the break-up until
+the fall gales have driven the fishing-schooners home to harbour.
+
+[Illustration: "APPEARED WITH A LITTLE STEAM-LAUNCH, THE PRINCESS MAY"]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+_FAITH and DUTY_
+
+
+When Dr. Grenfell first appeared on the coast, I am told, the folk
+thought him a madman of some benign description. He knew nothing of
+the reefs, the tides, the currents, cared nothing, apparently, for the
+winds; he sailed with the confidence and reckless courage of a
+Labrador skipper. Fearing at times to trust his schooner in unknown
+waters, he went about in a whale-boat, and so hard did he drive her
+that he wore her out in a single season. She was capsized with all
+hands, once driven out to sea, many times nearly swamped, once blown
+on the rocks; never before was a boat put to such tasks on that coast,
+and at the end of it she was wrecked beyond repair. Next season he
+appeared with a little steam-launch, the _Princess May_--her beam was
+eight feet!--in which he not only journeyed from St. Johns to
+Labrador, to the astonishment of the whole colony, but sailed the
+length of that bitter coast, passing into the gulf and safely out
+again, and pushing to the very farthest settlements in the north. Late
+in the fall, upon, the return journey to St. Johns in stormy weather,
+she was reported lost, and many a skipper, I suppose, wondered that
+she had lived so long; but she weathered a gale that bothered the
+mail-boat, and triumphantly made St. Johns, after as adventurous a
+voyage, no doubt, as ever a boat of her measure survived.
+
+"Sure," said a skipper, "I don't know how she done it. The Lord," he
+added, piously, "must kape an eye on that man."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a new proverb on the coast. The folk say, when a great wind
+blows, "This'll bring Grenfell!" Often it does. He is impatient of
+delay, fretted by inaction; a gale is the wind for him--a wind to take
+him swiftly towards the place ahead. Had he been a weakling, he would
+long ago have died on the coast; had he been a coward, a multitude of
+terrors would long ago have driven him to a life ashore; had he been
+anything but a true man and tender, indeed, he would long ago have
+retreated under the suspicion and laughter of the folk. But he has
+outsailed the Labrador skippers--out-dared them--done deeds of courage
+under their very eyes that they would shiver to contemplate,--never in
+a foolhardy spirit; always with the object of kindly service. So he
+has the heart and willing hand of every honest man on the
+Labrador--and of none more than of the men of his crew, who take the
+chances with him; they are wholly devoted.
+
+One of his engineers, for example, once developed the unhappy habit of
+knocking the cook down.
+
+"You must keep your temper," said the doctor. "This won't do, you
+know."
+
+But there came an unfortunate day when, being out of temper, the
+engineer again knocked the cook down.
+
+"This is positively disgraceful!" said the doctor. "I can't keep a
+quarrelsome fellow aboard the mission-ship. Remember that, if you
+will, when next you feel tempted to strike the cook."
+
+The engineer protested that he would never again lay hands on the
+cook, whatever the provocation. But again he lost his temper, and down
+went the poor cook, flat on his back.
+
+"I'll discharge you," said the doctor, angrily, "at the end of the
+cruise!"
+
+The engineer pleaded for another chance. He was denied. From day to
+day he renewed his plea, but to no purpose, and at last the crew came
+to the conclusion that something really ought to be done for the
+engineer, who was visibly fretting himself thin.
+
+"Very well," said the doctor to the engineer; "I'll make this
+agreement with you. If ever again you knock down the cook, I'll put
+you ashore at the first land we come to, and you may get back to St.
+Johns as best you can."
+
+It was a hard alternative. The doctor is not a man to give or take
+when the bargain has been struck; the engineer knew that he would
+surely go ashore somewhere on that desolate coast, whether the land
+was a barren island or a frequented harbour, if ever again the cook
+tempted him beyond endurance.
+
+"I'll stand by it, sir," he said, nevertheless; "for I don't want to
+leave you."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the course of time the _Princess May_ was wrecked or worn out. Then
+came the _Julia Sheridan_, thirty-five feet long, which the mission
+doctor bought while she yet lay under water from her last wreck; he
+raised her, refitted her with what money he had, and pursued his
+venturesome and beneficent career, until she, too, got beyond so hard
+a service. Many a gale she weathered, off "the worst coast in the
+world"--often, indeed, in thick, wild weather, the doctor himself
+thought the little craft would go down; but she is now happily
+superannuated, carrying the mail in the quieter waters of Hamilton
+Inlet. Next came the _Sir Donald_--a stout ship, which in turn
+disappeared, crushed in the ice. The _Strathcona_, with a hospital
+amidships, is now doing duty; and she will continue to go up and down
+the coast, in and out of the inlets, until she in her turn finds the
+ice and the wind and the rocks too much for her.
+
+"'Tis bound t' come, soon or late," said a cautious friend of the
+mission. "He drives her too hard. He've a right t' do what he likes
+with his own life, I s'pose, but he've a call t' remember that the
+crew has folks t' home."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the mission doctor is not inconsiderate; he is in a hurry--the
+coast is long, the season short, the need such as to wring a man's
+heart. Every new day holds an opportunity for doing a good deed--not
+if he dawdles in the harbours when a gale is abroad, but only if he
+passes swiftly from place to place, with a brave heart meeting the
+dangers as they come. He is the only doctor to visit the Labrador
+shore of the Gulf, the Strait shore of Newfoundland, the populous east
+coast of the northern peninsula of Newfoundland, the only doctor known
+to the Esquimaux and poor "liveyeres" of the northern coast of
+Labrador, the only doctor most of the "liveyeres" and green-fish
+catchers of the middle coast can reach, save the hospital physician at
+Indian Harbour. He has a round of three thousand miles to make. It is
+no wonder that he "drives" the little steamer--even at full steam,
+with all sail spread (as I have known him to do), when the fog is
+thick and the sea is spread with great bergs.
+
+"I'm in a hurry," he said, with an impatient sigh. "The season's late.
+We must get along."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+We fell in with him at Red Ray in the Strait, in the thick of a heavy
+gale from the northeast. The wind had blown for two days; the sea was
+running high, and still fast rising; the schooners were huddled in the
+harbours, with all anchors out, many of them hanging on for dear life,
+though they lay in shelter. The sturdy little coastal boat, with four
+times the strength of the _Strathcona_, had made hard work of it that
+day--there was a time when she but held her own off a lee shore in the
+teeth of the big wind.
+
+It was drawing on towards night when the doctor came aboard for a
+surgeon from Boston, a specialist, for whom he had been waiting.
+
+"I see you've steam up," said the captain of the coastal boat. "I hope
+you're not going out in _this_, doctor!"
+
+"I have some patients at the Battle Harbour Hospital, waiting for our
+good friend from Boston," said the doctor, briskly. "I'm in a hurry.
+Oh, yes, I'm going out!"
+
+"For God's sake, don't!" said the captain earnestly.
+
+The doctor's eye chanced to fall on the gentleman from Boston, who was
+bending over his bag--a fine, fearless fellow, whom the prospect of
+putting out in that chip of a steamer would not have perturbed, though
+the doctor may then not have known it. At any rate, as though
+bethinking himself of something half forgotten, he changed his mind of
+a sudden.
+
+"Oh, very well," he said. "I'll wait until the gale blows out."
+
+He managed to wait a day--no longer; and the wind was still wild, the
+sea higher than ever; there was ice in the road, and the fog was
+dense. Then out he went into the thick of it. He bumped an iceberg,
+scraped a rock, fairly smothered the steamer with broken water; and at
+midnight--the most marvellous feat of all--he crept into Battle
+Harbour through a narrow, difficult passage, and dropped anchor off
+the mission wharf.
+
+Doubtless he enjoyed the experience while it lasted--and promptly
+forgot it, as being commonplace. I have heard of him, caught in the
+night in a winter's gale of wind and snow, threading a tumultuous,
+reef-strewn sea, his skipper at the wheel, himself on the bowsprit,
+guiding the ship by the flash and roar of breakers, while the sea
+tumbled over him. If the chance passenger who told me the story is to
+be believed, upon that trying occasion the doctor had the "time of his
+life."
+
+"All that man wanted," I told the doctor subsequently, "was, as he
+says, 'to bore a hole in the bottom of the ship and crawl out.'"
+
+"Why!" exclaimed the doctor, with a laugh of surprise. "He wasn't
+_frightened_, was he?"
+
+[Illustration: "THE HOSPITAL SHIP, STRATHCONA"]
+
+Fear of the sea is quite incomprehensible to this man. The passenger
+was very much frightened; he vowed never to sail with "that devil"
+again. But the doctor is very far from being a dare-devil; though he
+is, to be sure, a man altogether unafraid; it seems to me that his
+heart can never have known the throb of fear. Perhaps that is in part
+because he has a blessed lack of imagination, in part, perhaps,
+because he has a body as sound as ever God gave to a man, and has used
+it as a man should; but it is chiefly because of his simple and
+splendid faith that he is an instrument in God's hands--God's to do
+with as He will, as he would say. His faith is exceptional, I am
+sure--childlike, steady, overmastering, and withal, if I may so
+characterize it, healthy. It takes something such as the faith he has
+to move a man to run a little steamer at full speed in the fog when
+there is ice on every hand. It is hardly credible, but quite true, and
+short of the truth: neither wind nor ice nor fog, nor all combined,
+can keep the _Strathcona_ in harbour when there comes a call for help
+from beyond. The doctor clambers cheerfully out on the bowsprit and
+keeps both eyes open. "As the Lord wills," says he, "whether for wreck
+or service. I am about His business."
+
+It is a sublime expression of the old faith.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+_THE LIVEYERE_
+
+
+Doctor Grenfell's patients are of three classes. There is first the
+"liveyere"--the inhabitant of the Labrador coast--the most ignorant
+and wretched of them all. There is the Newfoundland "outporter"--the
+small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his
+hook and line for subsistence. There is the Labradorman--the
+Newfoundland fisherman of the better class, who fishes the Labrador
+coast in the summer season and returns to his home port when the snow
+begins to fly in the fall. Some description of these three classes is
+here offered, that the reader may understand the character and
+condition of the folk among whom Dr. Grenfell labours.
+
+"As a permanent abode of civilized man," it is written in a very
+learned if somewhat old-fashioned work, "Labrador is, on the whole,
+one of the most uninviting spots on the face of the earth." That is
+putting it altogether too delicately; there should be no
+qualification; the place is a brutal desolation. The weather has
+scoured the coast--a thousand miles of it--as clean as an old bone: it
+is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy grass and wide
+patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and
+craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills
+between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at
+the edge of the inland wilderness. The interior is forbidding; few
+explorers have essayed adventure there; but the Indians--an expiring
+tribe--and trappers who have caught sight of the "height of land" say
+that it is for the most part a vast table-land, barren, strewn with
+enormous boulders, scarce in game, swarming with flies, with
+vegetation surviving only in the hollows and ravines--a sullen,
+forsaken waste.
+
+Those who dwell on the coast are called "liveyeres" because they say,
+"Oh, ay, zur, I lives yere!" in answer to the question. These are not
+to be confounded with the Newfoundland fishermen who sail the Labrador
+seas in the fishing season--an adventurous, thrifty folk, bright-eyed,
+hearty in laughter--twenty-five thousand hale men and boys, with many
+a wife and maid, who come and return again. Less than four thousand
+poor folk have on the long coast the "permanent abode" of which the
+learned work speaks--much less, I should think, from the Strait of
+Belle Isle to Cape Chidley. It is an evil fate to be born there: the
+Newfoundlanders who went north from their better country, the Hudson
+Bay Company's servants who took wives from the natives, all the chance
+comers who procrastinated their escape, desperately wronged their
+posterity; the saving circumstance is the very isolation of the
+dwelling-place--no man knows, no man really _knows_, that elsewhere
+the earth is kinder to her children and fairer far than the
+wind-swept, barren coast to which he is used. They live content,
+bearing many children, in inclemency, in squalor, and, from time to
+time, in uttermost poverty--such poverty as clothes a child in a
+trouser leg and feeds babies and strong men alike on nothing but flour
+and water. They were born there: that is where they came from; that is
+why they live there.
+
+"'Tis a short feast and a long famine," said a northern "liveyere,"
+quite cheerfully; to him it was just a commonplace fact of life.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are degrees of wretchedness: a frame cottage is the habitation
+of the rich and great where the poor live in turf huts; and the poor
+subsist on roots and a paste of flour and water when the rich feast on
+salt junk. The folk who live near the Strait of Belle Isle and on the
+gulf shore may be in happier circumstances. To be sure, they know the
+pinch of famine; but some--the really well-to-do--are clear of the
+over-shadowing dread of it. The "liveyeres" of the north dwell in
+huts, in lonely coves of the bays, remote even from neighbours as
+ill-cased as themselves; there they live and laugh and love and suffer
+and die and bury their dead--alone. To the south, however, there are
+little settlements in the more sheltered harbours--the largest of not
+more than a hundred souls--where there is a degree of prosperity and
+of comfort; potatoes are a luxury, but the flour-barrel is always
+full, the pork-barrel not always empty, and there are raisins in the
+duff on feast-days; moreover, there are stoves in the whitewashed
+houses (the northern "liveyere's" stove is more often than not a flat
+rock), beds to sleep in, muslin curtains in the little windows, and a
+flower, it may be, sprouting desperately in a red pot on the sill.
+That is the extreme of luxury--rare to be met with; and it is at all
+times open to dissolution by famine.
+
+"Sure, zur, _last_ winter," a stout young fellow boasted, "we had all
+the grease us wanted!"
+
+[Illustration: "THE LABRADOR 'LIVEYERE'"]
+
+It is related of a thrifty settler named Olliver, however, who lived
+with his wife and five children at Big Bight,--he was a man of
+superior qualities, as the event makes manifest,--that, having come
+close to the pass of starvation at the end of a long winter, he set
+out afoot over the hills to seek relief from his nearest neighbour,
+forty miles away. But there was no relief to be had; the good
+neighbour had already given away all that he dared spare, and
+something more. Twelve miles farther on he was again denied; it is
+said that the second neighbour mutely pointed to his flour-barrel and
+his family--which was quite sufficient for Olliver, who thereupon
+departed to a third house, where his fortune was no better. Perceiving
+then that he must depend upon the store of food in his own house,
+which was insufficient to support the lives of all, he returned home,
+sent his wife and eldest son and eldest daughter away on a pretext,
+despatched his three youngest children with an axe, and shot himself.
+As he had foreseen, wife, daughter, and son survived until the
+"break-up" brought food within their reach; and the son was a
+well-grown boy, and made a capable head of the house thereafter.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The "liveyere" is a fisherman and trapper. In the summer he catches
+cod; in the winter he traps the fox, otter, mink, lynx, and marten,
+and sometimes he shoots a bear, white or black, and kills a wolf. The
+"planter," who advances the salt to cure the fish, takes the catch at
+the end of the season, giving in exchange provisions at an incredible
+profit; the Hudson Bay Company takes the fur, giving in exchange
+provisions at an even larger profit; for obvious reasons, both aim
+(there are exceptions, of course) to keep the "liveyere" in
+debt--which is not by any means a difficult matter, for the "liveyere"
+is both shiftless and (what is more to the point) illiterate. So it
+comes about that what he may have to eat and wear depends upon the
+will of the "planter" and of the company; and when for his ill-luck or
+his ill-will both cast him off--which sometimes happens--he looks
+starvation in the very face. A silver fox, of good fur and acceptable
+colour, is the "liveyere's" great catch; no doubt his most ecstatic
+nightmare has to do with finding one fast in his trap; but when, "more
+by chance than good conduct," as they say, he has that heavenly
+fortune (the event is of the rarest), the company pays sixty or eighty
+dollars for that which it sells abroad for $600. Of late, however, the
+free-traders seem to have established a footing on the coast; their
+stay may not be long, but for the moment, at any rate, the "liveyere"
+may dispose of his fur to greater advantage--if he dare.
+
+The earth yields the "liveyere" nothing but berries, which are
+abundant, and, in midsummer, "turnip tops"; and as numerous dogs are
+needed for winter travelling--wolfish creatures, savage, big,
+famished--no domestic animals can be kept. There was once a man who
+somehow managed for a season to possess a pig and a sheep; he marooned
+his dogs on an island half a mile off the coast; unhappily, however,
+there blew an off-shore wind in the night, and next morning neither
+the pig nor the sheep was to be found; the dogs were engaged in
+innocent diversions on the island, but there was evidence sufficient
+on their persons, so to speak, to convict them of the depredation in
+any court of justice. There are no cows on the coast, no
+goats,--consequently no additional milk-supply for babies,--who manage
+from the beginning, however, to thrive on bread and salt beef, if put
+to the necessity. There are no pigs--there is one pig, I believe,--no
+sheep, no chickens; and the first horses to be taken to the sawmill on
+Hamilton Inlet so frightened the natives that they scampered in every
+direction for their lives whenever the team came near, crying: "Look
+out! The harses is comin'!" The caribou are too far inland for most of
+the settlers; but at various seasons (excluding such times as there is
+no game at all) there are to be had grouse, partridge, geese,
+eider-duck, puffin, gulls, loon and petrel, bear, arctic hare, and bay
+seal, which are shot with marvellously long and old guns--some of them
+ancient flintlocks.
+
+Notwithstanding all, the folk are large and hardy--capable of
+withstanding cruel hardship and deprivation.
+
+In summer-time the weather is blistering hot inland; and on the coast
+it is more often than not wet, foggy, blustering--bitter enough for
+the man from the south, who shivers as he goes about. Innumerable
+icebergs drift southward, scraping the coast as they go, and patches
+of snow lie in the hollows of the coast hills--midway between Battle
+Harbour and Cape Chidley there is a low headland called Snowy Point
+because the snow forever lies upon it. But warm, sunny days are to be
+counted upon in August--days when the sea is quiet, the sky deep
+blue, the rocks bathed in yellow sunlight, the air clear and bracing;
+at such times it is good to lie on the high heads and look away out to
+sea, dreaming the while. In winter, storm and intense cold make most
+of the coast uninhabitable; the "liveyeres" retire up the bays and
+rivers, bag and baggage, not only to escape the winds and bitter cold,
+but to be nearer the supply of game and fire-wood. They live in little
+"tilts"--log huts of one large square room, with "bunks" at each end
+for the women-folk, and a "cockloft" above for the men and lads. It is
+very cold; frost forms on the walls, icicles under the "bunks"; the
+thermometer frequently falls to fifty degrees below zero, which, as
+you may be sure, is exceedingly cold near the sea. Nor can a man do
+much heavy work in the woods, for the perspiration freezes under his
+clothing. Impoverished families have no stoves--merely an arrangement
+of flat stones, with an opening in the roof for the escape of the
+smoke, with which they are quite content if only they have enough
+flour to make hard bread for all.
+
+It goes without saying that there is neither butcher, baker, nor
+candlestick-maker on the coast. Every man is his own bootmaker,
+tailor, and what not; there is not a trade or profession practiced
+anywhere. There is no resident doctor, save the mission doctors, one
+of whom is established at Battle Harbour, and with a dog-team makes a
+toilsome journey up the coast in the dead of winter, relieving whom he
+can. There is no public building, no municipal government, no road.
+There is no lawyer, no constable; and I very much doubt that there is
+a parson regularly stationed among the whites beyond Battle Harbour,
+with the exception of the Moravian missionaries. They are scarce
+enough, at any rate, for the folk in a certain practical way to feel
+the hardship of their absence. Dr. Grenfell tells of landing late one
+night in a lonely harbour where three "couples wanted marrying." They
+had waited many years for the opportunity. It chanced that the doctor
+was entertaining a minister on the cruise; so one couple determined at
+once to return to the ship with him. "The minister," says the doctor,
+"decided that pronouncing the banns might be dispensed with in this
+case. He went ahead with the ceremony, for the couple had three
+children already!"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The "liveyere" is of a sombrely religious turn of mind--his creed as
+harsh and gloomy as the land he lives in; he is superstitious as a
+savage as well, and an incorrigible fatalist, all of which is not hard
+to account for: he is forever in the midst of vast space and silence,
+face to face with dread and mysterious forces, and in conflict with
+wind and sea and the changing season, which are irresistible and
+indifferent.
+
+Jared was young, lusty, light-hearted; but he lived in the fear and
+dread of hell. I had known that for two days.
+
+"The flies, zur," said he to the sportsman, whose hospitality I was
+enjoying, "was wonderful bad the day."
+
+We were twelve miles inland, fishing a small stream; and we were now
+in the "tilt," at the end of the day, safe from the swarming, vicious
+black-flies.
+
+"Yes," the sportsman replied, emphatically. "I've suffered the
+tortures of the damned this day!"
+
+Jared burst into a roar of laughter--as sudden and violent as a
+thunderclap.
+
+"What you laughing at?" the sportsman demanded, as he tenderly stroked
+his swollen neck.
+
+"Tartures o' the damned!" Jared gasped. "Sure, if _that's_ all 'tis,
+I'll jack 'asy about it!"
+
+He laughed louder--reckless levity; but I knew that deep in his heart
+he would be infinitely relieved could he believe--could he only make
+sure--that the punishment of the wicked was no worse than an eternity
+of fighting with poisonous insects.
+
+"Ay," he repeated, ruefully, "if that's all 'twas, 'twould not trouble
+me much."
+
+The graveyard at Battle Harbour is in a sheltered hollow near the sea.
+It is a green spot--the one, perhaps, on the island--and they have
+enclosed it with a high board fence. Men have fished from that harbour
+for a hundred years and more--but there are not many graves; why, I do
+not know. The crumbling stones, the weather-beaten boards, the
+sprawling ill-worded inscriptions, are all, in their way, eloquent:
+
+[Illustration: "Sarah Combe died the fourth of August, 1881,
+aged 31 years."]
+
+There is another, better carved, somewhat better spelled, but quite as
+interesting and luminous:
+
+            In
+      Memory of John
+       Hill who Died
+      December 30 1890
+          Aged 34
+
+    Weep not dear Parents
+    For your lost tis my
+    Etarnel gain May
+    May Crist you all take up
+    The crost that we
+    Shuld meat again
+
+These things are, indeed, eloquent--of ignorance, of poverty; but no
+less eloquent of sorrow and of love. The Labrador "liveyere" is kin
+with the whole wide world.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+_WITH The FLEET_
+
+
+In the early spring--when the sunlight is yellow and the warm winds
+blow and the melting snow drips over the cliffs and runs in little
+rivulets from the barren hills--in the thousand harbours of
+Newfoundland the great fleet is made ready for the long adventure
+upon the Labrador coast. The rocks echo the noise of hammer and
+saw and mallet and the song and shout of the workers. The new
+schooners--building the winter long at the harbour side--are hurried
+to completion. The old craft--the weather-beaten, ragged old craft,
+which, it may be, have dodged the reefs and out-lived the gales of
+forty seasons--are fitted with new spars, patched with new canvas and
+rope, calked anew, daubed anew and, thus refitted, float brave enough
+on the quiet harbour water. There is no end to the bustle of labour on
+ships and nets--no end to the clatter of planning. From the skipper of
+the ten-ton _First Venture_, who sails with a crew of sons bred for
+the purpose, to the powerful dealer who supplies on shares a fleet of
+seventeen fore-and-afters manned from the harbours of a great bay,
+there is hope in the hearts of all. Whatever the last season, every
+man is to make a good "voyage" now. This season--_this_ season--there
+is to be fish a-plenty on the Labrador!
+
+The future is bright as the new spring days. Aunt Matilda is to have a
+bonnet with feathers--when Skipper Thomas gets home from the Labrador.
+Little Johnny Tatt, he of the crooked back, is to know again the
+virtue of Pike's Pain Compound, at a dollar a bottle, warranted to
+cure--when daddy gets home from the Labrador. Skipper Bill's Lizzie,
+plump, blushing, merry-eyed, is to wed Jack Lute o' Burnt Arm--when
+Jack comes back from the Labrador. Every man's heart, and, indeed,
+most men's fortunes, are in the venture. The man who has nothing has
+yet the labour of his hands. Be he skipper, there is one to back his
+skill and honesty; be he hand, there is no lack of berths to choose
+from. Skippers stand upon their record and schooners upon their
+reputation; it's take your choice, for the hands are not too many: the
+skippers are timid or bold, as God made them; the schooners are lucky
+or not, as Fate determines. Every man has his chance. John Smith o'
+Twillingate provisions the _Lucky Queen_ and gives her to the
+penniless Skipper Jim o' Yellow Tickle on shares. Old Tom Tatter o'
+Salmon Cove, with plea and argument, persuades the Four Arms trader to
+trust him once again with the _Busy Bee_. He'll get the fish _this_
+time. Nar a doubt of it! _He'll_ be home in August--this year--loaded
+to the gunwale. God knows who pays the cash when the fish fail! God
+knows how the folk survive the disappointment! It is a great lottery
+of hope and fortune.
+
+When, at last, word comes south that the ice is clearing from the
+coast, the vessels spread their little wings to the first favouring
+winds; and in a week--two weeks or three--the last of the Labradormen
+have gone "down north."
+
+Dr. Grenfell and his workers find much to do among these men and women
+and children.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Indian Harbour where the _Strathcona_ lay at anchor, I went aboard
+the schooner _Jolly Crew_. It was a raw, foggy day, with a fresh
+northeast gale blowing, and a high sea running outside the harbour.
+They were splitting fish on deck; the skiff was just in from the
+trap--she was still wet with spray.
+
+"I sails with me sons an' gran'sons, zur," said the skipper, smiling.
+"Sure, I be a old feller t' be down the Labrador, isn't I, zur?"
+
+He did not mean that. He was proud of his age and strength--glad that
+he was still able "t' be at the fishin'."
+
+[Illustration: "AT INDIAN HARBOR"]
+
+"'Tis a wonder you've lived through it all," said I.
+
+He laughed. "An' why, zur?" he asked.
+
+"Many's the ship wrecked on this coast," I answered.
+
+"Oh no, zur," said he; "not so many, zur, as you might think. Down
+this way, zur, _we knows how t' sail_!"
+
+That was a succinct explanation of very much that had puzzled me.
+
+"Ah, well," said I, "'tis a hard life."
+
+"Hard?" he asked, doubtfully.
+
+"Yes," I answered; "'tis a hard life--the fishin'."
+
+"Oh no, zur," said he, quietly, looking up from his work. "'Tis
+just--just _life_!"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+They do, indeed, know how "t' sail." The Newfoundland government,
+niggardly and utterly independable when the good of the fisherfolk is
+concerned, of whatever complexion the government may chance to be, but
+prodigal to an extraordinary degree when individual self-interests are
+at stake--this is a delicate way of putting an unpleasant
+truth,--keeps no light burning beyond the Strait of Belle Isle; the
+best it does, I believe, is to give wrecked seamen free passage home.
+Under these difficult circumstances, no seamen save Newfoundlanders,
+who are the most skillful and courageous of all, could sail that
+coast: and they only because they are born to follow the sea--there is
+no escape for them--and are bred to sailing from their earliest years.
+
+"What you going to be when you grow up?" I once asked a lad on the far
+northeast coast.
+
+He looked at me in vast astonishment.
+
+"What you going to _be_, what you going to _do_," I repeated, "when
+you grow up?"
+
+Still he did not comprehend. "Eh?" he said.
+
+"What you going to work at," said I, in desperation, "when you're a
+man?"
+
+"Oh, zur," he answered, understanding at last, "I isn't clever enough
+t' be a parson!"
+
+And so it went without saying that he was to fish for a living! It is
+no wonder, then, that the skippers of the fleet know "how t' sail."
+The remarkable quality of the sea-captains who come from among them
+impressively attests the fact--not only their quality as sailors, but
+as men of spirit and proud courage. There is one--now a captain of a
+coastal boat on the Newfoundland shore--who takes his steamer into a
+ticklish harbour of a thick, dark night, when everything is black
+ahead and roundabout, steering only by the echo of the ship's whistle!
+There is another, a confident seaman, a bluff, high-spirited fellow,
+who was once delayed by bitter winter weather--an inky night, with ice
+about, the snow flying, the seas heavy with frost, the wind blowing a
+gale.
+
+"Where have you been?" they asked him, sarcastically, from the head
+office.
+
+The captain had been on the bridge all night.
+
+"Berry-picking," was his laconic despatch in reply.
+
+There is another--also the captain of a coastal steamer--who thought
+it wise to lie in harbour through a stormy night in the early winter.
+
+"What detains you?" came a message from the head office.
+
+"It is not a fit night for a vessel to be at sea," the captain
+replied; and thereupon he turned in, believing the matter to be at an
+end.
+
+The captain had been concerned for his vessel--not for his life; nor
+yet for his comfort. But the underling at the head office
+misinterpreted the message.
+
+"What do we pay you for?" he telegraphed.
+
+So the captain took the ship out to sea. Men say that she went out of
+commission the next day, and that it cost the company a thousand
+dollars to refit her.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+"A dunderhead," say the folk, "can _cotch_ fish; but it takes a _man_
+t' find un." It is a chase; and, as the coast proverb has it, "the
+fish have no bells." It is estimated that there are 7,000 square miles
+of fishing-banks off the Labrador coast. There will be fish
+somewhere--not everywhere; not every man will "use his salt" (the
+schooners go north loaded with salt for curing) or "get his load." In
+the beginning--this is when the ice first clears away--there is a race
+for berths. It takes clever, reckless sailing and alert action to
+secure the best. I am reminded of a skipper who by hard driving to
+windward and good luck came first of all to a favourable harbour. It
+was then night, and his crew was weary, so he put off running out his
+trap-leader until morning; but in the night the wind changed, and when
+he awoke at dawn there were two other schooners lying quietly at
+anchor near by and the berths had been "staked." When the traps are
+down, there follows a period of anxious waiting. Where are the fish?
+There are no telegraph-lines on that coast. The news must be spread by
+word of mouth. When, at last, it comes, there is a sudden change of
+plan--a wild rush to the more favoured grounds.
+
+It is in this scramble that many a skipper makes his great mistake. I
+was talking with a disconsolate young fellow in a northern harbour
+where the fish were running thick. The schooners were fast loading;
+but he had no berth, and was doing but poorly with the passing days.
+
+"If I hadn't--if I _only_ hadn't--took up me trap when I did," said
+he, "I'd been loaded an' off home. Sure, zur, would you believe it?
+but I had the berth off the point. Off the point--the berth off the
+point!" he repeated, earnestly, his eyes wide. "An', look! I hears
+they's a great run o' fish t' Cutthroat Tickle. So I up with me trap,
+for I'd been gettin' nothin'; an'--an'--would you believe it? but the
+man that put his down where I took mine up took a hundred quintal[2]
+out o' that berth next marnin'! An' he'll load," he groaned, "afore
+the week's out!"
+
+[Illustration: "SET THE TRAPS IN THE OPEN SEA"]
+
+When the fish are running, the work is mercilessly hard; it is kept up
+night and day; there is no sleep for man or child, save, it may be, an
+hour's slumber where they toil, just before dawn. The schooner lies at
+anchor in the harbour, safe enough from wind and sea; the rocks,
+surrounding the basin in which she lies, keep the harbour water placid
+forever. But the men set the traps in the open sea, somewhere off the
+heads, or near one of the outlying islands; it may be miles from the
+anchorage of the schooner. They put out at dawn--before dawn, rather;
+for they aim to be at the trap just when the light is strong enough
+for the hauling. When the skiff is loaded, they put back to harbour in
+haste, throw the fish on deck, split them, salt them, lay them neatly
+in the hold, and put out to the trap again. I have seen the
+harbours--then crowded with fishing-craft--fairly ablaze with light at
+midnight. Torches were flaring on the decks and in the turf hut on the
+rocks ashore. The night was quiet; there was not a sound from the
+tired workers; but the flaring lights made known that the wild, bleak,
+far-away place--a basin in the midst of barren, uninhabited hills--was
+still astir with the day's work.
+
+At such times, the toil at the oars, and at the splitting-table,[3]
+whether on deck or in the stages--and the lack of sleep, and the icy
+winds and cold salt spray--is all bitter cruel to suffer. The Labrador
+fisherman will not readily admit that he lives a hard life; but if you
+suggest that when the fish are running it may be somewhat more
+toilsome than lives lived elsewhere, he will grant you something.
+
+"Oh, ay," he'll drawl, "when the fish is runnin', _'tis_ a bit hard."
+
+I learned from a child--he was merry, brave, fond of the adventure--that
+fishing is a pleasant business in the sunny midsummer months; but that
+when, late in the fall, the skiff puts out to the trap at dawn, it is
+wise to plunge one's hands deep in the water before taking the oars,
+no matter how much it hurts, for one's wrists are then covered with
+salt-water sores and one's palms are cracked, even though one take the
+precaution of wearing a brass chain--that, oh, yes! it is wise to
+plunge one's hands in the cold water, as quick as may be; for thus one
+may "limber 'em up" before the trap is reached.
+
+"'Tis not hard, now," said he. "But, oh--oo--oo! when the big
+nor'easters blow! Oo--oo!" he repeated, with a shrug and a sage shake
+of the head; "'tis won-der-ful hard those times!"
+
+The return is small. The crews are comprised of from five to ten men,
+with, occasionally, a sturdy maid for cook, to whom is given thirty
+dollars for her season's work; some old hands will sail on no ship
+with a male cook, for, as one of them said, "Sure, some o' thim min
+can't boil water without burnin' it!" A good season's catch is one
+hundred quintals of dry fish a man. A simple calculation--with some
+knowledge of certain factors which I need not state--makes it plain
+that a man must himself catch, as his share of the trap, 30,000 fish
+if he is to net a living wage. If his return is $250 he is in the
+happiest fortune--richly rewarded, beyond his dreams, for his summer's
+work. One-half of that is sufficient to give any modest man a warm
+glow of content and pride. Often--it depends largely upon chance and
+the skill of his skipper--the catch is so poor that he must make the
+best of twenty-five or thirty dollars. It must not be supposed that
+the return is always in cash; it is usually in trade, which is quite a
+different thing--in Newfoundland.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The schooners take many passengers north in the spring. Such are
+called "freighters" on the coast; they are put ashore at such harbours
+as they elect, and, for passage for themselves, families, and gear,
+pay upon the return voyage twenty-five cents for every hundredweight
+of fish caught. As a matter of course, the vessels are preposterously
+overcrowded. Dr. Grenfell tells of counting thirty-four men and
+sixteen women (no mention was made of children) aboard a nineteen-ton
+schooner, then on the long, rough voyage to the north. The men fish
+from the coast in small boats just as the more prosperous "green-fish
+catchers" put out from the schooners. Meantime, they live in mud huts,
+which are inviting or otherwise, as the women-folk go; some are damp,
+cave-like, ill-savoured, crowded; others are airy, cozy, the floors
+spread deep with powdered shell, the whole immaculately kept. When the
+party is landed, the women sweep out the last of the winter's snow,
+the men build great fires on the floors; indeed, the huts are soon
+ready for occupancy. At best, they are tiny places--much like
+children's playhouses. There was once a tall man who did not quite fit
+the sleeping place assigned to him; but with great good nature he cut
+a hole in the wall, built a miniature addition for his feet, and slept
+the summer through at comfortable full length. It is a great outing
+for the children; they romp on the rocks, toddle over the nearer
+hills, sleep in the sunshine; but if they are eight years old, as one
+said--or well grown at five or seven--they must do their little share
+of work.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Withal, the Labradormen are of a simple, God-fearing, clean-lived,
+hardy race of men. There was once a woman who made boast of her high
+connection in England, as women will the wide world over; and when she
+was questioned concerning the position the boasted relative occupied,
+replied, "Oh, _he's_ Superintendent o' Foreign Governments!" There was
+an austere old Christian who on a Sunday morning left his trap--his
+whole fortune--lie in the path of a destroying iceberg rather than
+desecrate the Lord's day by taking it out of the water. Both political
+parties in Newfoundland shamelessly deceive the credulous fisherfolk;
+there was a childlike old fellow who, when asked, "And what will you
+do if there _is_ no fish?" confidently answered: "Oh, they's goin' t'
+be a new Gov'ment. _He'll_ take care o' we!" There was a sturdy son of
+the coast who deserted his schooner at sea and swam ashore. But he had
+mistaken a barren island for the mainland, which was yet far off; and
+there he lived, without food, for twenty-seven days! When he was
+picked up, his condition was such as may not be described (the
+Labrador fly is a vicious insect); he was unconscious, but he survived
+to fish many another season.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mail-boat picked up Skipper Thomas of Carbonear--then master of a
+loaded schooner--at a small harbour near the Straits. His crew carried
+him aboard; for he was desperately ill, and wanted to die at home,
+where his children were.
+
+"He's wonderful bad," said one of the men. "He've consumption."
+
+"I'm just wantin' t' die at home," he said, again and again. "Just
+that--just where my children be!"
+
+All hearts were with him in that last struggle--but no man dared hope;
+for the old skipper had already beaten off death longer than death is
+wont to wait, and his strength was near spent.
+
+"Were you sick when you sailed for the Labrador in the spring?" they
+asked him.
+
+"Oh, ay," said he; "I were terrible bad then."
+
+"Then why," they said--"why did you come at all?"
+
+They say he looked up in mild surprise. "I had t' make me livin'," he
+answered, simply.
+
+[Illustration: "THE BULLY-BOAT BECOMES A HOME"]
+
+His coffin was knocked together on the forward deck next morning--with
+Carbonear a day's sail beyond.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The fleet goes home in the early fall. The schooners are loaded--some
+so low with the catch that the water washes into the scuppers. "You
+could wash your hands on her deck," is the skipper's proudest boast.
+The feat of seamanship, I do not doubt, is not elsewhere equalled. It
+is an inspiring sight to see the doughty little craft beating into the
+wind on a gray day. The harvesting of a field of grain is good to look
+upon; but I think that there can be no more stirring sight in all the
+world, no sight more quickly to melt a man's heart, more deeply to
+move him to love men and bless God, than the sight of the Labrador
+fleet beating home loaded--toil done, dangers past; the home port at
+the end of a run with a fair wind. The home-coming, I fancy, is much
+like the return of the viking ships to the old Norwegian harbours must
+have been. The lucky skippers strut the village roads with swelling
+chests, heroes in the sight of all; the old men, long past their
+labour, listen to new tales and spin old yarns; the maids and the lads
+renew their interrupted love-makings. There is great rejoicing--feasting,
+merrymaking, hearty thanksgiving.
+
+Thanks be to God, the fleet's home!
+
+[Footnote 2: A "clever hand" can split--that is, clean--thirty fish in
+a minute.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A quintal is, roughly, a hundred pounds. One hundred
+quintals of green fish are equal, roughly, to thirty of dry, which, at
+$3, would amount to $90.]
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+_On The FRENCH SHORE_
+
+
+Doctor Grenfell appears to have a peculiar affection for the
+outporters of what is locally known as the "French Shore"--that
+stretch of coast lying between Cape John and the northernmost point of
+Newfoundland: it is one section of the shore upon which the French
+have fishing rights. This is the real Newfoundland; to the writer
+there is no Newfoundland apart from that long strip of rock against
+which the sea forever breaks: none that is not of punt, of wave, of
+fish, of low sky and of a stalwart, briny folk. Indeed, though he has
+joyously lived weeks of blue weather in the outports, with the sea all
+a-ripple and flashing and the breeze blowing warm, in retrospect land
+and people resolve themselves into a rocky harbour and a sturdy little
+lad with a question--the harbour, gray and dripping wet, a cluster of
+whitewashed cottages perched on the rocks, towards which a tiny,
+red-sailed punt is beating from the frothy open, with the white of
+breakers on either hand, while a raw wind lifts the fog from the black
+inland hills, upon which ragged patches of snow lie melting; the lad,
+stout, frank-eyed, tow-headed, browned by the wind, bending over the
+splitting-table with a knife in his toil-worn young hand and the blood
+of cod dripping from his fingers, and looking wistfully up, at last,
+to ask a question or two concerning certain old, disquieting
+mysteries.
+
+"Where do the tide go, zur, when 'e runs out?" he plainted. "Where do
+'e go, zur? Sure, zur, _you_ is able t' tell me that, isn't you?"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+So, in such a land--where, on some bleak stretches of coast, the
+potatoes are grown in imported English soil, where most gardens, and
+some graveyards, are made of earth scraped from the hollows of the
+hills, where four hundred and nineteen bushels of lean wheat are grown
+in a single year, and the production of beef-cattle is insignificant
+as compared with the production of babies--in such a land there is
+nothing for the young man to do but choose his rock, build his little
+cottage and his flake and his stage, marry a maid of the harbour when
+the spring winds stir his blood, gather his potato patch, get a pig
+and a goat, and go fishing in his punt. And they do fish, have always
+fished since many generations ago the island was first settled by
+adventurous Devon men, and must continue to fish to the end of time.
+Out of a total male population of one hundred thousand, which includes
+the city-folk of St. Johns and an amazing proportion of babies and
+tender lads, about fifty-five thousand men and grown boys catch fish
+for a living.
+
+"Still an' all, they's no country in the world like this!" said the
+old skipper. "Sure, a man's set up in life when he haves a pig an' a
+punt an' a potato patch."
+
+"But have you ever seen another?" I asked.
+
+"I've been so far as Saint Johns, zur, an' once t' the waterside o'
+Boston," was the surprising reply, "an' I'm thinkin' I knows what the
+world's like."
+
+So it is with most Newfoundlanders: they love their land with an
+intolerant prejudice; and most are content with the life they lead.
+"The Newfoundlander comes back," is a significant proverb of the
+outports; and, "White Bay's good enough for me," said a fishwife to me
+once, when I asked her why she still remained in a place so bleak and
+barren, "for I've heered tell 'tis wonderful smoky an' n'isy 't Saint
+Johns." The life they live, and strangely love, is exceeding toilsome.
+Toil began for a gray-haired, bony-handed old woman whom I know when
+she was so young that she had to stand on a tub to reach the
+splitting-table; when, too, to keep her awake and busy, late o'
+nights, her father would make believe to throw a bloody cod's head at
+her. It began for that woman's son when, at five or six years old, he
+was just able to spread the fish to dry on the flake, and continued in
+earnest, a year or two later, when first he was strong enough to keep
+the head of his father's punt up to the wind. But they seem not to
+know that fishing is a hard or dangerous employment: for instance, a
+mild-eyed, crooked old fellow--he was a cheerful Methodist, too, and
+subject to "glory-fits"--who had fished from one harbour for sixty
+years, computed for me that he had put out to sea in his punt at least
+twenty thousand times, that he had been frozen to the seat of his punt
+many times, that he had been swept to sea with the ice-packs, six
+times, that he had weathered six hundred gales, great and small, and
+that he had been wrecked more times than he could "just mind" at the
+moment; yet he was the only old man ever I met who seemed honestly to
+wish that he might live his life over again!
+
+The hook-and-line man has a lonely time of it. From earliest dawn,
+while the night yet lies thick on the sea, until in storm or calm or
+favouring breeze he makes harbour in the dusk, he lies off shore,
+fishing--tossing in the lop of the grounds, with the waves to balk and
+the wind to watch warily, while he tends his lines. There is no jolly
+companionship of the forecastle and turf hut for him--no new scene, no
+hilarious adventure; nor has he the expectation of a proud return to
+lighten his toil. In the little punt he has made with his own hands he
+is forever riding an infinite expanse, which, in "fish weather," is
+melancholy, or threatening, or deeply solemn, as it may chance--all
+the while and all alone confronting the mystery and terrible immensity
+of the sea. It may be that he gives himself over to aimless musing,
+or, even less happily, to pondering certain dark mysteries of the
+soul; and so it comes about that the "mad-house 't Saint Johns" is
+inadequate to accommodate the poor fellows whom lonely toil has bereft
+of their senses--melancholiacs, idiots and maniacs "along o'
+religion."
+
+Notwithstanding all, optimism persists everywhere on the coast. One
+old fisherman counted himself favoured above most men because he had
+for years been able to afford the luxury of cream of tartar; and
+another, a brawny giant, confessed to having a disposition so
+pertinaciously happy that he had come to regard a merry heart as his
+besetting sin. Sometimes an off-shore gale puts an end to all the
+fishing; sometimes it is a sudden gust, sometimes a big wave,
+sometimes a confusing mist, more often long exposure to spray and
+shipped water and soggy winds. It was a sleety off-shore gale, coming
+at the end of a sunny, windless day, that froze or drowned thirty men
+off Trinity Bay in a single night; and it was a mere puff on a "civil"
+evening--but a swift, wicked little puff, sweeping round Breakheart
+Head--that made a widow of Elizabeth Rideout o' Duck Cove and took her
+young son away. Often, however, the hook-and-line man fishes his
+eighty years of life, and dies in his bed as cheerfully as he has
+lived and as poor as he was born.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+_SOME OUTPORT FOLK_
+
+
+It had been a race against the peril of fog and the discomfort of a
+wet night all the way from Hooping Harbour. We escaped the scowl of
+the northeast, the gray, bitter wind and the sea it was fast fretting
+to a fury, when the boat rounded Canada Head and ran into the shelter
+of the bluffs at Englee--into the damp shadows sombrely gathered
+there. When the punt was moored to the stage-head, the fog had
+thickened the dusk into deep night, and the rain had soaked us to the
+skin. There was a light, a warm, yellow light, shining from a window,
+up along shore and to the west. We stumbled over an erratic footpath,
+which the folk of the place call "the roaad"--feeling for direction,
+chancing the steps, splashing through pools of water, tripping over
+sharp rocks. The whitewashed cottages of the village, set on the
+hills, were like the ghosts of houses. They started into sight, hung
+suspended in the night, vanished as we trudged on. The folk were all
+abed--all save Elisha Duckworthy, that pious giant, who had been late
+beating in from the fishing grounds off the Head. It was Elisha who
+opened the door to our knock, and sent a growling, bristling dog back
+to his place with a gentle word.
+
+[Illustration: "THE WHITEWASHED COTTAGES ON THE HILLS"]
+
+"Will you not----"
+
+"Sure, sir," said Elisha, a smile spreading from his eyes to the very
+tip of his great beard, "'twould be a hard man an' a bad Christian
+that would turn strangers away. Come in, sir! 'Tis a full belly you'll
+have when you leaves the table, an' 'tis a warm bed you'll sleep in,
+this night."
+
+After family prayers, in which we, the strangers he had taken in, were
+commended to the care and mercy of God in such simple, feeling phrases
+as proved the fine quality of this man's hospitality and touched our
+hearts in their innermost parts, Elisha invited us to sit by the
+kitchen fire with him "for a spell." While the dogs snored in chorus
+with a young kid and a pig by the roaring stove, and the chickens
+rustled and clucked in their coop under the bare spruce sofa which
+Elisha had made, and the wind flung the rain against the window-panes,
+we three talked of weather and fish and toil and peril and death. It
+may be that a cruel coast and a sea quick to wrath engender a certain
+dread curiosity concerning the "taking off" in a man who fights day by
+day to survive the enmity of both. Elisha talked for a long time of
+death and heaven and hell. Then, solemnly, his voice fallen to a
+whisper, he told of his father, Skipper George, a man of weakling
+faith, who had been reduced to idiocy by wondering what came after
+death--by wondering, wondering, wondering, in sunlight and mist and
+night, off shore in the punt, labouring at the splitting-table, at
+work on the flake, everywhere, wondering all the time where souls took
+their flight.
+
+"'Twere wonderin' whether hell do be underground or not," said Elisha,
+"that turned un over at last. Sure, sir," with a sigh, "'twere doubt,
+you sees. 'Tis faith us must have."
+
+Elisha stroked the nearest dog with a gentle hand--a mighty hand,
+toil-worn and misshapen, like the man himself.
+
+"Do your besettin' sin get the best o' you, sir?" he said, looking up.
+It may be that he craved to hear a confession of failure that he might
+afterwards sustain himself with the thought that no man is
+invulnerable. "Sure, we've all besettin' sins. When we do be snatched
+from the burnin' brands, b'y, a little spark burns on, an' on, an' on;
+an' he do be wonderful hard t' douse out. 'Tis like the eye us must
+pluck out by command o' the Lard. With some men 'tis a taste for
+baccy. With some 'tis a scarcity o' salt in the fish. With some 'tis
+too much water in the lobster cans. With some 'tis a cravin' for
+sweetness. With me 'tis worse nor all. Sure, sir," he went on, "I've
+knowed some men so fond, so wonderful fond, o' baccy that um smoked
+the shoes off their children's feet. 'Tis their besettin' sin,
+sir--'tis their besettin' sin. But 'tis not baccy that worries me. The
+taste fell away when I were took from sin. 'Tis not that. 'Tis worse.
+Sure, with me, sir," he said, brushing his hand over his forehead in a
+weary, despairing way, "'tis laughin'. 'Tis the sin of jokin' that puts
+my soul in danger o' bein' hove overboard into the burnin' lake. I
+were a wonderful joker when I were a sinful man. 'Twas all I lived
+for--not t' praise God an' prepare my soul for death. When I gets up
+in the marnin', now, sir, I feels like jokin' like what I used t' do,
+particular if it do be a fine day. Ah, sir," with a long sigh, "'tis a
+great temptation, I tells you--'tis a wonderful temptation. But 'tis
+not set down in the Book that Jesus Christ smiled an' laughed, an'
+with the Lard's help I'll beat the devil yet. I'll beat un," he cried,
+as if inspired to some supreme struggle. "I'll beat un," he repeated,
+clinching his great hands. "I will!"
+
+Elisha bade us good-night with a solemn face. A little smile--a poor,
+frightened little smile of tender feeling for us--flickered in his
+eyes for the space of a breath. But he snuffed it out relentlessly,
+expressed his triumph with a flash of his eye, and went away to bed.
+In the morning, when the sun called us up, he had come back from the
+early morning's fishing, and was singing a most doleful hymn of death
+and judgment over the splitting-table in the stage. The sunlight was
+streaming into the room, and the motes were all dancing merrily in the
+beam. The breeze was rustling the leaves of a sickly bush under the
+window--coaxing them to hopeful whisperings. I fancied that the sea
+was all blue and rippling, and that the birds were flitting through
+the sunlight, chirping their sympathy with the smiling day. But
+Elisha, his brave heart steeled against the whole earth's frivolous
+mood, continued heroically to pour forth his dismal song.
+
+Twilight was filling the kitchen with strange shadows. "We had
+disposed of Aunt Ruth's watered fish and soaked hard-bread with hunger
+for a relish. Uncle Simon's glance was mournfully intent upon the bare
+platter.
+
+"But," said Aunt Ruth, with obstinate emphasis, "I knows they be. 'Tis
+not what we hears we believe, sir. No, 'tis not what we hears. 'Tis
+what we sees. An' I've seed un."
+
+"'Tis true, sir," said Uncle Simon, looking up. "They be nar a doubt
+about it."
+
+"But where," said I, "did she get her looking-glass?"
+
+"They be many a trader wrecked on this coast, sir," said Uncle Simon.
+
+"'Twere not a mermaid I seed," said Aunt Ruth. "'Twere a mer_man_."
+
+"Sure," said Uncle Simon, mysteriously, "they do be in the sea the
+shape o' all that's on the land--shape for shape, sir. They be
+sea-horses an' sea-cows an' sea-dogs, Why not the shape o' humans?"
+
+"Well," said Aunt Ruth, "'twas when I were a little maid. An' 'twas in
+a gale o' wind. I goes down t' Billy Cove t' watch me father bring the
+punt in, an' I couldn't see un anywhere. So I thought he were
+drownded. 'Twere handy t' dark when I seed the merman rise from the
+water. He were big an' black--so black as the stove. I could see the
+eyes of un so plain as I can see yours. He were not good lookin'--no,
+I'll say that much--he were not good lookin'. He waved his arms, an'
+beckoned an' beckoned an' beckoned. But, sure, sir, I wouldn't go, for
+I were feared. ''Tis the soul o' me father,' thinks I. 'Sure, the sea's
+cotched un.' So I runs home an' tells me mother; an' she says 'twere a
+merman. I _knows_ they be mermans an' mermaids, 'cause I'se seed un.
+'Tis what we sees we believes."
+
+"'Tis said," said Uncle Simon, "that if you finds un on the rocks an'
+puts un in the water they gives you three wishes; an' all you has t'
+do is wish, an'----"
+
+"'Tis said," said Aunt Ruth, with a prodigious frown across the table,
+"that the mermaids trick the fishermen t' the edge o' the sea an'
+steals un away. Uncle Simon Ride," she went on, severely, "if ever
+you----"
+
+Uncle Simon looked sheepish. "Sure, woman," said he, the evidences of
+guilt plain on his face, "they be no danger t' me. 'Twould take a
+clever mermaid t'----"
+
+"Uncle Simon Ride," said Aunt Ruth, "nar another word. An' if you
+don't put my spinnin' wheel t' rights this night I'll give you your
+tea in a mug[4] t'-morrow--an' mind that, sir, mind that!"
+
+After we had left the table Uncle Simon took me aside. "She do be a
+wonderful woman," said he, meaning Aunt Ruth. Then, earnestly, "She've
+no cause t' be jealous o' the mermaids. No, sir--sure, no."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is difficult to convey an adequate conception of the barrenness of
+this coast. If you were to ask a fisherman of some remote
+outport what his flour was made of he would stare at you and be mute.
+"Wheat" would be a new, meaningless word to many a man of those
+places. It may be that the words of the Old Skipper of Black Harbour
+will help the reader to an understanding of the high value set upon
+the soil and all it produces.
+
+"Come with me," said the Old Skipper, "an' I'll show you so fine a
+garden as ever you seed."
+
+The garden was on an island two miles off the mainland. Like many
+another patch of ground it had to be cultivated from a distant place.
+It was an acre, or thereabouts, which had been "won from the
+wilderness" by the labour of several generations; and it was owned by
+eleven families. This was not a garden made by gathering soil and
+dumping it in a hollow, as most gardens are; it was a real "meadow."
+
+"Look at them potatoes, sir," said the skipper. He radiated pride in
+the soil's achievement as he waited for my outburst of congratulation.
+
+The potatoes, owing to painstaking fertilization with small fish, had
+attained admirable size--in tops. But the hay!
+
+"'Tis fine grass," said the skipper. "Fine as ever you seed!"
+
+It was thin, and nearer gray than yellow; and every stalk was weak in
+the knees. I do it more than justice when I write that it rose above
+my shoe tops.
+
+"'Tis sizable hay," said the skipper. "'Tis time I had un cut."
+
+On the way back the skipper caught sight of a skiff-load of hay, which
+old John Burns was sculling from Duck Island. He was careful to point
+it out as good evidence of the fertility of that part of the world. By
+and by we came to a whisp of hay which had fallen from the skiff. It
+was a mere handful floating on the quiet water.
+
+"The wastefulness of that dunderhead!" exclaimed the skipper.
+
+He took the boat towards the whisp of hay, puffing his wrath all the
+while.
+
+"Pass the gaff, b'y," he said.
+
+With the utmost care he hooked the whisp of hay--to the last
+straw--and drew it over the side.
+
+"'Tis a sin," said he, "t' waste good hay like that."
+
+Broad fields, hay and wheat and corn, all yellow, waving to the
+breeze--the sun flooding all--were far, far beyond this man's
+imagination. He did not know that in other lands the earth yields
+generously to the men who sow seed. How little did the harvest mean to
+him! The world is a world of rock and sea--of sea and naked rock. Soil
+is gathered in buckets. Gardens are made by hand. The return is
+precious in the sight of men.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Uncle Zeb Gale--Daddy Gale, who had long ago lost count of his
+grandchildren, they were so many--Ol' Zeb tottered up from the sea,
+gasping and coughing, but broadly smiling in the intervals. He had a
+great cod in one hand, and his old cloth cap was in the other. His
+head was bald, and his snowy beard covered his chest. Toil and the
+weight of years had bowed his back, spun a film over his eyes and
+cracked his voice. But neither toil nor age nor hunger nor cold had
+broken his cheery interest in all the things of life. Ol' Zeb smiled
+in a sweetly winning way. He stopped to pass a word with the stranger,
+who was far away from home, and therefore, no doubt, needed a
+heartening word or two.
+
+"Fine even, zur," said he.
+
+"Tis that, Uncle Zeb. How have the fish been to-day?"
+
+"Oh, they be a scattered fish off the Mull, zur. But 'tis only a
+scattered one. They don't run in, zur, like what they used to when I
+were young, sure."
+
+"How many years ago, sir?"
+
+[Illustration: "TOIL"]
+
+"'Tis many year, zur," said Uncle Zeb, smiling indulgence with my
+youth. "They was fish a-plenty when--when--when I were young. 'Tis not
+what it used t' be--no, no, zur; not at all. Sure, zur, I been goin'
+t' the grounds off the Mull since I were seven years old. Since I were
+seven! I be eighty-three now, zur. Seventy-six year, zur, I has fished
+out o' this here harbour."
+
+Uncle Zeb stopped to wheeze a bit. He was out of breath with this long
+speech. And when he had wheezed a bit, a spasm of hard coughing took
+him. He was on the verge of the last stage of consumption, was Uncle
+Zeb.
+
+"'Tis a fine harbour t' fish from, zur," he gasped. "They be none
+better. Least-ways, so they tells me--them that's cruised about a
+deal. Sure, I've never seen another. 'Tis t' Conch[5] I've wanted t'
+go since I were a young feller. I'll see un yet, zur--sure, an' I
+will."
+
+"You are eighty-three?" said I.
+
+"I be the oldest man t' the harbour, zur. I marries the maids an' the
+young fellers when they's no parson about."
+
+"You have fished out of this harbour for seventy-six years?" said I,
+in vain trying to comprehend the deprivation and dull toil of that
+long life--trying to account for the childlike smile which had
+continued to the end of it.
+
+"Ay, zur," said Uncle Zeb. "But, sure, they be plenty o' time t' see
+Conch yet. Me father were ninety when he died. I be only
+eighty-three."
+
+Uncle Zeb tottered up the hill. Soon the dusk swallowed his old hulk.
+I never saw him again.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were seated on the Head, high above the sea, watching the fleet of
+punts come from the Mad Mull grounds and from the nets along shore,
+for it was evening. Jack had told me much of the lore of
+lobster-catching and squid-jigging. Of winds and tides and long
+breakers he had given me solemn warnings--and especially of that
+little valley down which the gusts came, no man knew from where. He
+had imparted certain secrets concerning the whereabouts of gulls'
+nests and juniper-berry patches, for I had won his confidence. I had
+been informed that Uncle Tom Bull's punt was in hourly danger of
+turning over because her spread of canvas was "scandalous" great, that
+Bill Bludgell kept the "surliest dog t' the harbour," that the "goaats
+was wonderful hard t' find" in the fog, that a brass bracelet would
+cure salt-water sores on the wrists, that--I cannot recall it all. He
+had "mocked" a goat, a squid, a lamb, old George Walker at prayer, and
+"Uncle" Ruth berating "Aunt" Simon for leaving the splitting-table
+unclean.
+
+Then he sang this song, in a thin, sweet treble, which was good to
+hear:
+
+   "'Way down on Pigeon Pond Island,
+    When daddy comes home from swilin',[6]
+        (Maggoty fish hung up in the air,
+        Fried in maggoty butter)!
+     Cakes and tea for breakfast,
+     Pork and duff for dinner,
+     Cakes and tea for supper,
+    When daddy comes home from swilin'."
+
+He asked me riddles, thence he passed to other questions, for he was a
+boy who wondered, and wondered, what lay beyond those places which he
+could see from the highest hill. I described a street and a pavement,
+told him that the earth was round, defined a team of horses, corrected
+his impression that a church organ was played with the mouth, and
+denied the report that the flakes and stages of New York were the
+largest in the world. The boys of the outports do not play
+games--there is no time, and at any rate, the old West Country games
+have not come down to this generation with the dialect, so I told him
+how to play tag, hide-and-go-seek and blind man's buff, and proved to
+him that they might be interesting, though I had to admit that they
+might not be profitable in certain cases.
+
+"Some men," said I, at last, "have never seen the sea."
+
+He looked at me and laughed his unbelief. "Sure," said he, "not a
+hundred haven't?"
+
+"Many more than that."
+
+"'Tis hard t' believe, zur," he said. "Terrible hard."
+
+"We were silent while he thought it over.
+
+"What's the last harbour in the world?" he asked.
+
+I hesitated.
+
+"The very last, zur! They do say 'tis St. Johns. But, sure, zur, they
+must be something beyond. What do it be?" After a silence, he
+continued, speaking wistfully, "What's the last harbour in all the
+whole world, zur? Doesn't you know?"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It had been a raw day--gray and gusty, with the wind breaking over the
+island from a foggy sea: a sullen day. All day long there had been no
+rest from the deep harsh growl of the breakers. We were at tea in Aunt
+Amanda's cottage; the table was spread with dried caplin, bread and
+butter, and tea, for Aunt Amanda, the Scotsman who was of the harbour,
+and me. The harbour water was fretting under the windows as the swift
+gusts whipped over it; and beyond the narrows, where the sea was
+tumbling, the dusk was closing over the frothy waves. Out there a punt
+was reeling in from the Mad Mull fishing grounds; its brown sail was
+like a leaf driven by the wind. I saw the boat dart through the
+narrows to the sheltered water, and I sighed in sympathy with the man
+who was then furling his wet and fluttering sail, for I, too, had
+experienced the relief of sweeping from that waste of grasping waves
+to the sanctuary of the harbour.
+
+"Do you think of the sea as a friend?" I asked Aunt Amanda.
+
+She was a gray, stern woman, over whose face, however, a tender smile
+was used to flitting, the light lingered last in her faded eyes--the
+daughter, wife, and mother of punt fishermen. So she had dealt hand to
+hand with the sea since that night, long ago, when, as a wee maid, she
+first could reach the splitting-table by standing on a bucket. As a
+child she had tripped up the path to Lookout Head, to watch her father
+beat in from the grounds; as a maiden, she had courted when the
+moonlight was falling upon the ripples of Lower Harbour, and the punt
+was heaving to the spent swell of the open; as a woman she had kept
+watch on the moods of the sea, which had possessed itself of her hours
+of toil and leisure. In the end--may the day be long in coming--she
+will be taken to the little graveyard under the Lookout in a skiff.
+Now, at my suggestion, she dropped her eyes to her apron, which she
+smoothed in an absent way. She seemed to search her life--all the
+terror, toil, and glory of it--for the answer. She was not of a kind
+to make light replies, and I knew that the word to come would be of
+vast significance.
+
+"It do seem to me," she said, turning her eyes to the darkening water,
+"that the say is hungry for the lives o' men."
+
+"Tut, woman!" cried the old Scotsman, his eyes all a-sparkle. "'Tis a
+libel on the sea. Why wull ye speak such trash to a stranger? Have ye
+never heard, sir, what the poet says?"
+
+"Well," I began to stammer.
+
+"Aye, man," said he, "they all babble about it. But have ye never
+read,
+
+  "'O, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
+  And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,
+  The exulting sense, the pulse's maddening play,
+  That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?'"
+
+With that, the sentimental old fellow struck an attitude. His head
+was thrown back; his eyes were flashing; his arm was rigid, and
+pointing straight through the window to that patch of white, far off
+in the gathering dark, where the sea lay raging. It ever took a poet
+to carry that old Scotsman off his feet--to sweep him to some high,
+cloudy place, where the things of life rearranged and decked
+themselves out to please his fancy. I confess, too, that his
+enthusiasm rekindled, for a moment, my third-reader interest in "a wet
+sheet and a flowing sea" and "a wind that follows fast." We have all
+loved well the sea of our fancy.
+
+"Grand, woman!" he exclaimed, turning to Aunt Amanda, and still
+a-tremble. "Splendid!"
+
+Aunt Amanda fixed him with her gray eye. "I don't know," she said,
+softly. "But I know that the say took me father from me when I was a
+wee maid."
+
+The Scotsman bent his head over his plate, lower and lower still. His
+fervour departed, and his face, when he looked up, was full of
+sympathy. Of a sudden my ears hearkened again to the growling
+breakers, and to the wind, as it ran past, leaping from sea to
+wilderness; and my spirit felt the coming of the dark.
+
+[Footnote 4: A scolding.]
+
+[Footnote 5: Some miles distant.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Sealing.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+_WINTER PRACTICE_
+
+
+It is, then, to the outporter, to the men of the fleet and to the
+Labrador liveyere that Doctor Grenfell devotes himself. The hospital
+at Indian Harbour is the centre of the Labrador activity; the hospital
+at St. Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French shore
+folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour--the first established, and,
+possibly, the best equipped of all--receives patients from all
+directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the
+Gulf. In the little hospital-ship, _Strathcona_, the doctor himself
+darts here and there and everywhere, all summer long, responding to
+calls, searching out the sick, gathering patients for the various
+hospitals. She is known to every harbour of the coast; and she is
+often overcrowded with sick bound to the hospitals for treatment or
+operation. Often, indeed, in cases of emergency, operations are
+performed aboard, while she tosses in the rough seas. She is never a
+moment idle while the waters are open. But in the fall, when
+navigation closes, she must go into winter quarters; and then the sick
+and starving are sought out by dog-team and komatik. There is no
+cessation of beneficent activity; there is merely a change in the
+manner of getting about. Summer journeys are hard enough, God knows!
+But winter travel is a matter of much greater difficulty and hardship.
+Not that the difficulty and hardship seem ever to be perceived by the
+mission-doctor; quite the contrary: there is if anything greater
+delight to be found in a wild, swift race over rotten or heaving ice,
+or in a night in the driving snow, than in running the _Strathcona_
+through a nor'east gale. The Indian Harbour hospital is closed in the
+fall; so intense is the cold, so exposed the situation, so scarce the
+wood, so few the liveyeres, that it has been found unprofitable to
+keep it open. There is another way of meeting the needs of the
+situation; and that is by despatching the Battle Harbour doctor
+northward in midwinter. The folk know that he is bound towards
+them--know the points of call--can determine within a month the time
+of his arrival. So they bring the sick to these places--and patiently
+wait. This is a hard journey--made alone with the dogs. Many a night
+the doctor must get into his sleeping bag and make himself as
+comfortable as possible in the snow, snuggled close to his dogs, for
+the sake of the warmth of their bodies. Six hundred miles north in the
+dead of winter, six hundred miles back again; it takes a man of
+unchangeable devotion to undertake it!
+
+[Illustration: "THE HOSPITAL AT BATTLE HARBOR"]
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Labrador dogs--pure and half-breed "huskies," with so much of the
+wolf yet in them that they never bark--are for the most part used by
+the doctor on his journeys. There would be no getting anywhere without
+them; and it must be said that they are magnificent animals, capable
+of heroic deeds. Every prosperous householder has at least six or
+eight full-grown sled-dogs and more puppies than he can keep track of.
+In summer they lie everywhere under foot by day, and by night howl in
+a demoniacal fashion far and near; but they fish for themselves in
+shallow water, and are fat, and may safely be stepped over. In winter
+they are lean, desperately hungry, savage, and treacherous--in
+particular, a menace to the lives of children, whom they have been
+known to devour. There was once a father, just returned from a day's
+hunt on the ice, who sent his son to fetch a seal from the waterside;
+the man had forgotten for the moment that the dogs were roaming the
+night and very hungry--and so he lost both his seal and his son. The
+four-year-old son of the Hudson Bay Company's agent at Cartwright
+chanced last winter to fall down in the snow. He was at once set upon
+by the pack; and when he was rescued (his mother told me the story) he
+had forty-two ugly wounds on his little body. For many nights
+afterwards the dogs howled under the window where he lay moaning.
+Eventually those concerned in the attack were hanged by the neck,
+which is the custom in such cases.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, when Dr. Grenfell was wintering at St. Anthony, on the French
+shore, there came in great haste from Conch, a point sixty miles
+distant, a komatik with an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who
+lay dying of hemorrhage. And while the doctor was preparing for this
+journey, a second komatik, despatched from another place, arrived with
+a similar message.
+
+"Come at once," it was. "My little boy has broken his thigh."
+
+The doctor chose first to visit the lad. At ten o'clock that night he
+was at the bedside. It had been a dark night--black dark: with the
+road precipitous, the dogs uncontrollable, the physician in great
+haste. The doctor thought, many a time, that there would be "more than
+one broken limb" by the time of his arrival. But there was no
+misadventure; and he found the lad lying on a settle, in great pain,
+wondering why he must suffer so.
+
+"Every minute or two," says the doctor, "there would be a jerk, a
+flash of pain, and a cry to his father, who was holding him all the
+time."
+
+The doctor was glad "to get the chloroform mask over the boy's
+face"--he is a sympathetic man, the doctor; glad, always, to ease
+pain. And at one o'clock in the morning the broken bone was set and
+the doctor had had a cup of tea; whereupon, he retired to a bed on the
+floor and a few hours' "watch below." At daylight, when he was up and
+about to depart, the little patient had awakened and was merrily
+calling to the doctor's little retriever.
+
+"He was as merry as a cricket," says the doctor, "when I bade him
+good-bye."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+About twelve hours on the way to Conch, where the man lay dying of
+hemorrhage--a two days' journey--the doctor fell in with a dog-train
+bearing the mail. And the mail-man had a letter--a hasty summons to a
+man in great pain some sixty miles in another direction. It was
+impossible to respond. "That call," says the doctor, sadly, "owing to
+sheer impossibility, was not answered." It was haste away to Conch,
+over the ice and snow--for the most of the time on the ice of the
+sea--in order that the man who lay dying there might be succoured. But
+there was another interruption. When the dog-train reached the coast,
+there was a man waiting to intercept it: the news of the doctor's
+probable coming had spread.
+
+"I've a fresh team o' dogs," sir, said he, "t' take you t' the island.
+There's a man there, an' he's wonderful sick."
+
+Would the doctor go? Yes--he would go! But he had no sooner reached
+that point of the mainland whence he was bound across a fine stretch
+of ice to the island than he was again intercepted. It was a young
+man, this time, whose mother lay ill, with no other Protestant family
+living within fifty miles. Would the doctor help her? Yes--the doctor
+would; and did. And when he was about to be on his way again----
+
+"Could you bear word," said the woman, "t' Mister Elliot t' come bury
+my boy? He said he'd come, sir; but now my little lad has been lying
+dead, here, since January."
+
+It was then early in March. Mr. Elliot was a Protestant fisherman who
+was accustomed to bury the Protestant dead of that district. Yes--the
+doctor would bear word to him. Having promised this, he set out to
+visit the sick man on the island; for whom, also, he did what he
+could.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Off again towards Conch--now with fresh teams, which had been provided
+by the friends of the man who lay there dying. And by the way a man
+brought his little son for examination and treatment--"a lad of three
+years," says the doctor; "a bright, healthy, embryo fisherman,
+light-haired and blue-eyed, a veritable celt."
+
+"And what's the matter with him?" was the physician's question.
+
+"He've a club foot, sir," was the answer.
+
+And so it turned out: the lad had a club foot. He was fond of telling
+his mother that he had a right foot and a wrong one. "The wrong one,
+mama," said he, "is no good." He was to be a cripple for life--utterly
+incapacitated: the fishing does not admit of club feet. But the doctor
+made arrangements for the child's transportation to the St. Anthony
+hospital, where he could, without doubt be cured; and then hurried on.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The way now led through a district desperately impoverished--as much
+by ignorance and indolence as by anything else. At one settlement of
+tilts there were forty souls, "without a scrap of food or money," who
+depended upon their neighbours--and the opening of navigation was
+still three months distant! In one tilt there lay what seemed to be a
+bundle of rags.
+
+"And who is this?" the doctor asked.
+
+It was a child. "The fair hair of a blue-eyed boy of about ten years
+disclosed itself," says the doctor. "Stooping over him I attempted to
+turn his face towards me. It was drawn, with pain, and a moan escaped
+the poor little fellow's lips. He had disease of the spine, with open
+sores in three places. He was stark naked, and he was starved to a
+skeleton. He gave me a bright smile before I left, but I confess to a
+shudder of horror at the thought that his lot might have been mine. Of
+course the 'fear of pauperizing' had to disappear before the claims of
+humanity. Yet, there, in the depth of winter," the doctor asks, with
+infinite compassion, "would not a lethal draught be the kindest friend
+of that little one of Him that loved the children?"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+For five days the doctor laboured in Conch, healing many of the folk,
+helping more; and at the end of that period the man who has suffered
+the hemorrhage was so far restored that with new dogs the doctor set
+out for Canada Bay, still travelling southward. There, as he says, "we
+had many interesting cases." One of these involved an operation: that
+of "opening a knee-joint and removing a loose body," with the result
+that a fisherman who had long been crippled was made quite well again.
+Then there came a second call from Conch. Seventeen men had come for
+the physician, willing to haul the komatik themselves, if no dogs were
+to be had. To this call the doctor immediately responded; and having
+treated patients at Conch and by the way, he set out upon the return
+journey to St. Anthony, fearing that his absence had already been
+unduly prolonged. And he had not gone far on the way before he fell in
+with another komatik, provided with a box, in which lay an old woman
+bound to St. Anthony hospital, in the care of her sons, to have her
+foot amputated.
+
+Crossing Hare Bay, the doctor had a slight mishap--rather amusing,
+too, he thinks.
+
+"One of my dogs fell through the ice," says he. "There was a biting
+nor'west wind blowing, and the temperature was ten degrees below zero.
+When we were one mile from the land, I got off to run and try the
+ice. It suddenly gave way, and in I fell. It did not take me long to
+get out, for I have had some little experience, and the best advice
+sounds odd: it is 'keep cool.' But the nearest house being at least
+ten miles, it meant, then, almost one's life to have no dry clothing.
+Fortunately, I had. The driver at once galloped the dogs back to the
+woods we had left, and I had as hard a mile's running as ever I had;
+for my clothing was growing to resemble the armour of an ancient
+knight more and more, every yard, and though in my youth I was
+accustomed to break the ice to bathe if necessary, I never tried
+running a race in a coat of mail. By the time I arrived at the trees
+and got out of the wind, my driver had a rubber poncho spread on the
+snow under a snug spruce thicket; and I was soon as dry and a great
+deal warmer than before."
+
+At St. Anthony, the woman's foot was amputated; and in two days the
+patient was talking of "getting up." Meantime, a komatik had arrived
+in haste from a point on the northwest coast--a settlement one hundred
+and twenty miles distant. The doctor was needed there--and the doctor
+went!
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: "THE DOCTOR ON A WINTER'S JOURNEY"]
+
+This brief and inadequate description of a winter's journey may not
+serve to indicate the hardship of the life the doctor leads: he has
+small regard for that; but it may faintly apprise the reader of the
+character of the work done, and of the will with which the doctor does
+it. One brief journey! The visitation of but sixty miles of coast! Add
+to this the numerous journeys of that winter, the various summer
+voyages of the _Strathcona_; conceive that the folk of two thousand
+miles are visited every year, often twice a year: then multiply by
+ten--for the mission has been in efficient existence for ten
+years--and the reader may reach some faint conception of the sum of
+good wrought by this man. But without knowing the desolate
+land--without observing the emaciated bodies of the children--without
+hearing the cries of distress--it is impossible adequately to realize
+the blessing his devotion has brought to the coast.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+_THE CHAMPION_
+
+
+The Deep-sea Mission is not concerned chiefly with the souls of the
+folk, nor yet exclusively with their bodies: it endeavours to provide
+them with religious instruction, to heal their ailments; but it is
+quite as much interested, apparently, in improving their material
+condition. To the starving it gives food, to the naked clothing; but
+it must not be supposed that charity is indiscriminately distributed.
+That is not the case. Far from it. When a man can cut wood for the
+steamer or hospitals in return for the food he is given, for example,
+he is required to do so; but the unhappy truth is that a man can cut
+very little wood "on a winter's diet" exclusively of flour. "You gets
+weak all of a suddent, zur," one expressed it to me. In his effort to
+"help the people help themselves" the doctor has established
+cooperative stores and various small industries. The result has been
+twofold: the regeneration of several communities, and an outbreak of
+hatred and dishonest abuse on the part of the traders, who have too
+long fattened on the isolation and miseries of the people. The
+cooperative stores, I believe, are thriving, and the small industries
+promise well. Thus the mission is at once the hope and comfort of the
+coast. The man on the _Strathcona_ is the only man, in all the long
+history of that wretched land, to offer a helping hand to the whole
+people from year to year without ill temper and without hope of gain.
+
+"But I can't do everything," says he.
+
+And that is true. There is much that the mission-doctor cannot
+do--delicate operations, for which the more skilled hand of a
+specialist is needed. For a time, one season, an eminent surgeon, of
+Boston, the first of many, it is hoped, cruised on the _Strathcona_,
+and most generously operated at Battle Harbour. The mission gathered
+the patients to the hospital from far and near before the surgeon
+arrived. Folk who had looked forward in dread to a painful death, fast
+approaching, were of a sudden promised life. There was a man coming,
+they were told, above the skill of the mission surgeons, who could
+surely cure them. The deed was as good as the promise: many operations
+were performed; all the sick who came for healing were healed; the
+hope of not one was disappointed. Folk who had suffered years of pain
+were restored. Never had such a thing been known on the Labrador. Men
+marvelled. The surgeon was like a man raising the dead. But there was
+a woman who is now, perhaps, dead; she lacked the courage. Day after
+day for two weeks she waited for the Boston surgeon; but when he came
+she fled in terror of the knife. Her ailment was mortal in that land;
+but she might easily have been cured; and she fled home when she knew
+that the healer had come. No doubt her children now know what it is to
+want a mother.
+
+Dr. Grenfell will let no man oppress his people when his arm is
+strong enough to champion them. There was once a rich man (so I
+was told before I met the doctor)--a man of influence and wide
+acquaintance--whose business was in a remote harbour of Newfoundland.
+He did a great wrong; and when the news of it came to the ears of the
+mission-doctor, the anchor of the _Strathcona_ came up in a hurry, and
+off she steamed to that place.
+
+"Now," said the doctor to this man, "you must make what amends you
+can, and you must confess your sin."
+
+The man laughed aloud. It seemed to him, no doubt, a joke that the
+mission-doctor should interfere in the affairs of one so rich who knew
+the politicians at St. Johns. But the mission-doctor was also a
+magistrate.
+
+"I say," said he, deliberately, "that you must pay one thousand
+dollars and confess your sin."
+
+The man cursed the doctor with great laughter, and dared him to do his
+worst. The joke still had point.
+
+"I warn you," said the doctor, "that I will arrest you if you do not
+do precisely as I say."
+
+The man pointed out to the doctor that his magisterial district lay
+elsewhere, and again defied him.
+
+"Very true," said the doctor; "but I warn you that I have a crew quite
+capable of taking you into it."
+
+The joke was losing its point. But the man blustered that he, too, had
+a crew.
+
+"You must make sure," said the doctor, "that they love you well enough
+to fight for you. On Sunday evening," he continued, "you will appear
+at the church at seven o'clock and confess your sin before the
+congregation; and next week you will pay the money as I have said."
+
+"I'll see you in h--ll first!" replied the man, defiantly.
+
+[Illustration: "A CREW QUITE CAPABLE OF TAKING YOU INTO IT"]
+
+At the morning service the doctor announced that a sinful man would
+confess his sin before them all that night. There was great
+excitement. Other men might be prevailed upon to make so humiliating a
+confession, the folk said, but not this one--not this rich man, whom
+they hated and feared, because he had so long pitilessly oppressed
+them. So they were not surprised when at the evening service the
+sinful man did not show his face.
+
+"Will you please to keep your seats," said the doctor, "while I go
+fetch that man."
+
+He found the man in a neighbour's house, on his knees in prayer, with
+his friends. They were praying fervently, it is said; but whether or
+not that the heart of the doctor might be softened I do not know.
+
+"Prayer," said the doctor, "is a good thing in its place, but it
+doesn't 'go' here. Come with me."
+
+The man meekly went with the doctor; he was led up the aisle of the
+church, was placed where all the people could see him; and then he was
+asked many questions, after the doctor had described the great sin of
+which he was guilty.
+
+"Did you do this thing?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"You are an evil man, of whom the people should beware?"
+
+"I am."
+
+"You deserve the punishment of man and God?"
+
+"I do."
+
+There was much more, and at the end of it all the doctor told the man
+that the good God would forgive him if he should ask in true faith and
+repentance, but that the people, being human, could not. For a whole
+year, he charged the people, they must not speak to that man; but if
+at the end of that time he had shown an honest disposition to mend his
+ways, they might take him to their hearts.
+
+The end of the story is that the man paid the money and left the
+place.
+
+This relentless judge, on a stormy day of last July, carried many
+bundles ashore at Cartwright, in Sandwich Bay of the Labrador. The
+wife of the Hudson Bay Company's agent exclaimed with delight when she
+opened them. They were Christmas gifts from the children of the
+"States" to the lads and little maids of that coast. With almost all
+there came a little letter addressed to the unknown child who was to
+receive the toy; they were filled with loving words--with good wishes,
+coming in childish sincerity from the warm little hearts. The doctor
+never forgets the Christmas gifts. He is the St. Nicholas of that
+coast. If he ever weeps at all, I should think it would be when he
+hears that despite his care some child has been neglected. The wife of
+the agent stowed away the gifts against the time to come.
+
+"It makes them _very_ happy," said the agent's wife.
+
+"Not long ago," I chanced to say, "I saw a little girl with a stick of
+wood for a dolly. Are they not afraid to play with these pretty
+things?"
+
+"They _are_," she laughed. "They use them for ornaments. But _that_
+doesn't matter. It makes them happy just to look at them."
+
+We all laughed.
+
+"And yet," she continued, "they _do_ play with them, sometimes, after
+all. There is a little girl up the bay who _has kissed the paint off
+her dolly_!"
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus and all the time, in storm and sunshine, summer and winter
+weather, Grenfell of the Deep-sea Mission goes about doing good; if
+it's not in a boat, it's in a dog-sled. He is what he likes to call "a
+Christian man." But he is also a hero--at once the bravest and the
+most beneficently useful man I know. If he regrets his isolation, if
+the hardship of the life sometimes oppresses him, no man knows it. He
+does much, but there is much more to do. If the good people of the
+world would but give a little more of what they have so
+abundantly--and if they could but know the need, they would surely do
+that--joy might be multiplied on that coast; nor would any man be
+wronged by misguided charity.
+
+"What a man does for the love of God," the doctor once said, "he does
+differently."
+
+
+
+
+_Decorated Cloth, $1.50_
+
+_Doctor Luke of The Labrador_
+
+BY NORMAN DUNCAN
+
+"Mr. Duncan is deserving of much praise for this, his first novel....
+In his descriptive passages Mr. Duncan is sincere to the smallest
+detail. His characters are painted in with bold, wide strokes....
+Unlike most first novels, 'Doctor Luke' waxes stronger as it
+progresses."--_N. Y. Evening Post_.
+
+_James MacArthur, of Harper's Weekly, says_: "I am delighted with
+'Doctor Luke.' So fine and noble a work deserves great success."
+
+"A masterpiece of sentiment and humorous characterization. Nothing
+more individual, and in its own way more powerful, has been done in
+American fiction.... The story is a work of art."--_The
+Congregationalist_.
+
+_Joseph B. Gilder, of The Critic, says_: "I look to see it take its
+place promptly among the best selling books of the season."
+
+"It fulfills its promise of being one of the best stories of the
+season. Mr. Duncan evidently is destined to make a name for himself
+among the foremost novelists of his day.... Doctor Luke is a magnetic
+character, and the love story in which he plays his part is a sweet
+and pleasant idyl.... The triumph of the book is its character
+delineation."--_Chicago Record-Herald_.
+
+_Miss Bacon, Literary Editor of The Booklover's Library, says_: "Of
+all the stories I have read this Autumn there is none that I would
+rather own."
+
+"Norman Duncan's novel is a great enterprise, and will probably prove
+to be the greatest book yet produced by a native of Canada."--_Toronto
+Globe_.
+
+
+
+
+_8vo, Cloth  Price, $1.75 net_
+
+_Denizens of the Deep_
+
+_By_ FRANK. T. BULLEN
+
+There is a new world of life and intelligence opened to our knowledge
+in Mr. Bullen's stories of the inhabitants of the sea. He finds the
+same fascinating interest in the lives of the dwellers in the deep as
+Thompson Seton found in the lives of the hunted ashore, and with the
+keenness and vigor which characterized his famous book "The Cruise of
+The Cachalot" he has made a book which, being based upon personal
+observation, buttressed by scientific facts and decorated by
+imagination, is a storehouse of information--an ideal romance of deep
+sea folk and, as _The Saturday Times-Review_ has said, worth a dozen
+novels.
+
+Not the least attractive feature of an unusually attractive volume is
+the series of illustrations by Livingston Bull and others.
+
+[Illustration: DENIZENS OF THE DEEP, FRANK T. BULLEN]
+
+
+
+
+_By_ MARGARET SANGSTER _Cloth, each, $1.50_
+
+_Janet Ward_
+
+_Eleanor Lee_
+
+Without exaggeration and with perfectly consistent naturalness Mrs.
+Sangster has produced two pieces of realism of a most healthy sort,
+demonstrating conclusively that novels may be at once clean and
+wholesome yet most thoroughly alive and natural. As with all her work,
+Mrs. Sangster exhibits her splendid skill and excellent taste, and
+succeeds in winning and holding her readers in these two books which
+treat of the life of today.
+
+"If ever there was an author whose personality shone through her work,
+Mrs. Margaret E. Sangster is that author. Mrs. Sangster has written a
+novel with a moral purpose. That was to be expected, but it was also
+to be expected that the story would be free from hysteria and
+intolerance, filled with gentle humor, sane common sense and warm
+human sympathy, and saturated with cheerful optimism. The book
+fulfills the expectation."--_The Lamp_.
+
+[Illustration: JANET WARD by Margaret E. Sangster]
+
+
+
+
+_Essays--Fiction_
+
+_By_ JAMES M. LUDLOW
+
+Incentives for Life. Personal and Public.
+
+12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.25 net.
+
+"Dr. Ludlow shows versatility and rare culture in this book of essays.
+From the first page one is impressed with the beautifully clear style,
+the brilliant thought which flashes through every sentence, and the
+marvelous storehouse of illustration from which the author draws. The
+vital importance of will power in the formation of character, and the
+incentives which lie back of it as motives to action, are set forth
+with vigor and power."--_Christian Observer_.
+
+Deborah. A Tale of the Times of Judas Maccabaeus. By the author of
+"The Captain of the Janizaries." 12mo, cloth, illustrated ... $1.50
+
+"Deborah is a genuine Jewess, noble, brilliant, loving and
+lovely."--_Congregationalist_.
+
+"Nothing in the class of fiction to which 'Deborah' belongs, the class
+of which 'Ben Hur' and 'Captain of the Janizaries' are familiar
+examples, exceeds the early chapters of this story in vividness and
+rapidity of action. The book as a whole has vigor and color."--_The
+Outlook_.
+
+[Illustration: DEBORAH, JAMES M. LUDLOW]
+
+
+
+
+_Tales of the West--Virile, true, tender_
+
+_By_ RALPH CONNOR
+
+The Sky Pilot; A Tale of the Foothills.
+
+12mo, cloth, illustrated ... Price, $1.25
+
+"Ralph Connor's 'Black Rock' was good, but 'The Sky Pilot' is better.
+The matter which he gives us is real life; virile, true, tender,
+humorous, pathetic, spiritual, wholesome. His style, fresh, crisp and
+terse, accords with the Western life, which he understands. Henceforth
+the foothills of the Canadian Rockies will probably be associated in
+many a mind with the name of 'Ralph Connor.'"--_The Outlook_.
+
+The Man From Glengarry; A Tale of the Ottawa.
+
+12mo, cloth ... Price, $1.50
+
+"As straight as a pine, as sweet as a balsam, as sound as a white
+oak."--_The Interview_.
+
+Glengarry School Days; A Tale of the Indian Lands.
+
+12mo, cloth ... Price, $1.25
+
+In pathos it reaches the high level of "The Sky Pilot." In atmosphere
+it is "The Man from Glengarry." In action it rivals "Black Rock."
+
+Black Rock; A Tale of the Selkirks.
+
+12mo, cloth ... Price, $1.25
+12mo, cloth, cheaper edition ... .25
+
+"'Ralph Connor' is some man's nom de plume. The world would insist on
+knowing whose. He has gone into the Northwest Canadian mountains and
+painted for us a picture of life in the mining camps of surpassing
+merit. With perfect wholesomeness, with exquisite delicacy, with
+entire fidelity, with truest pathos, with freshest humor, he has
+delineated character, has analyzed motives and emotions, and has
+portrayed life. Some of his characters deserve immortality, so
+faithfully are they created."--_St. Louis Globe-Democrat_.
+
+The world _has_ known and today Ralph Connor has been accorded the
+signal honor of seeing his books, by virtue of their sterling worth,
+attain a sale of over one and one-half million copies.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dr. Grenfell's Parish, by Norman Duncan
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH ***
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