Dr. Grenfell's parish : the deep sea fishermen

DE GREl^FELDS^
PARISH

NORMAN DUNCAN

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OE CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND

MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

i

DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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• i

A DOCTOR . . . THE PROPHET AND CHAMPION OF A PEOPLE

Dr, Grenf ell's Parish

ihe Deep Sea Fishermen

By
NORMAN DUNCAN

Author of
^^ Doctor Luke of the Labrador"

•!•

London
HODDER and STOUGHTON

27 Paternoster Row
1905

^ i

yrintelJ bQ JHanfjattan ^prcss,
Kfia gork, ®. 5. Q.

TO
TEE CBEW OF THE '' 8TBATHC0NA

Henry Bartlett,
Munden Clark,
William Percy,
John Scott,
Archie Butler,
James Hiscock,
Alec Sims,

Shipper

Second Hand

First Engineer

Second Engineer

Hospital Hand

Cook

Ship^s Boy

TO THE READER

THIS book pretends to no literary
excellence ; it has a far better rea-
son for existence — a larger justifica-
tion. Its purpose is to spread the knowl-
edge of the work of Dr. Wilfred T. Gren-
fell, of the Koyal National Mission to Deep-
Sea Fishermen, at work on the coasts of Ke w-
foundland 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 re-

TO THE READER

grets that the man and his work are pre-
sented in this inadequate way and by so
incapable a hand. The author is under ob-
ligation 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 vol-
ume. 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 y

Washington^ Pennsylvania, January 25, igos-

CONTENTS

I.

The Doctor .

II

II.

A Round of Bleak Coasts

i8

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

. no

XL

Winter Practice

. 132

XII.

The Champion

146

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing page
*' A Doctor ... the Prophet and Champion

of a People"
" It is an Evil Coast '* .
" Bound North "
"A Turf Hut" .
'*Set Sail from Great Yarmouth Harbour for

Labrador " .
" Appeared with a Little Steam-launch, the

Princess May "
" The Hospital Ship, Strathcona "
" The Labrador * Liveyere ' "
" At Indian Harbour "
" Set the Traps in the Open Sea "
" The Bully-boat Becomes a Home "
" The Whitewashed Cottages on the Hills "

"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 " 1 50

Title
20
30
44

50

55
65

73
86

93

lOI

Dr. Grenfeir s Parish

THE DOCTOR

DOCTOR WILFRED T. GREN-
FELL is the young Englishman
who, for the love of God, practices
medicine on the coasts of IS'ewf oundland 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 New-
foundland around Cape Norman and into
the Strait of Belle Isle, and from Ungava
Bay and Cape Chidley of the Labrador south-
ward 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
11

12 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

most part isolated and desperately wretched
— the shore fishermen of the remoter New-
foundland coasts, the Labrador " liveyeres,"
the Indians of the forbidding interior, the Es-
quimaux 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.

THE DOCTOR 13

" JSTo, sir."

" JSToa ? 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 ? Per-
haps you might do something — though you
isn't — a doctor."

14 DE. GEENFELL'S PAEISH

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 Au-
gust, 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

THE DOCTOE 15

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 — yoio — was ! "

He was crying.

" They need," thought I, " a mission-doc-
tor in these parts."

And the next day — in the harbour beyond
— I first heard of Grenfell. In that place

16 DE. GEENFELL^S PAEISH

they said they would send him to the little
maid who lay dying ; they assured me, in-
deed, 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 E'ewf oundland
and Labrador activities of the Eoyal l^a-
tional 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 At-
lantic 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 commer-

1^ THE DOCTOR 17

cial enterprises designed to " help the folk
help themselves" — the prophet and cham-
pion, 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 for-
bidding, 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
18

A EOUND OF BLEAK COASTS 19

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 ^ 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 Kun, Devil's Lookout and the
Quaker's Hat — beyond Johnny Paul's Kock
and the Wolves, Sandwich Bay, Tumble-
down Dick, Indian Harbour, and the White
Cockade — past Cape Harrigan, the Farm-
yard Islands and the Hen and Chickens —

* A " tickle " is a narrow passage to a harbour or be-
tween two islands.

20 DR. GEENFELL'S PARISH

far north to the great, craggy hills and
strange peoples of Kikkertadsoak, Scoralik,
Tunnulusoak, ISTain, 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 sail-
ing 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

A ROUND OF BLEAK COASTS 21

the sea in heavy weather ; barren hills,
rising abruptly — and all isolated — from safe
water; sunken rocks, disclosed, upon ap-
proach, 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."
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, how-
ever evil the place, is small accomplishment.
The Newfoundland lad of seven years would
count himself his father's shame if he failed

22 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 thou-
sand 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 break-
ers 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 Labra-
dor current is charged with them — hard,
dead- white glacier ice from the Arctic:

A ROUND OF BLEAK COASTS 23

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 Icnows 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 thou-
sand fishermen cast away, the coast littered
with splinters of ships — and, once (it is but

24 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

an incident), a schooner was torn from her
anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet
above the high- water mark. These are ex-
ceptional 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

A ROUND OF BLEAK COASTS 25

— at the masthead ; the schooners are some-
times 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, run-
ning 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 cast-
away skipper. " Thick ? Why, sure^ 'twas
thick ! "

So the men who sail that coast hate fog,
fear it, avoid it when they can, which is sel-
dom ; 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.

Ill

SHIPS in PERIL

IT is to be remarked that a wreck on the
Labrador coast excites no wide surprise,
i^ever a season passes but some craft
are cast away. But that is merely the for-
tune of sailing those waters — a fortune
which the mission-doctor accepts with a
glad heart : it provides him with an inter-
esting 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 nar-
rowly escaped, at least. And the fashion
of that escape is sometimes almost incredi-
ble.

The schooner AlVs Well (which is a ficti-
tious name) was helpless in the wind and sea
and whirling snow of a great blizzard. At
dusk she was driven inshore — no man knew
26

SHIPS IN PERIL 27

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 be-
low 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 sud-
denly 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,

28 DE. GEENFELL'S PAEISH

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'

SHIPS IN PERIL 29

'* 'Twas a wonderful big lire us set ; an' it
kep' us warm, so us set there all day w at chin'
the skipper o' the Right curC 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

30 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 / goes ! ' "

The man had been on the reef more than
forty-eight hours !

The Army Zass, 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 im-
portant that he should have it. There
was an iceberg floating near ; it was mass-
ive ; 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

SHIPS IN PERIL 31

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 he
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.

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

32 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 ISTewfoundlanders
occasionally navigate by means of old
rhymes ; and this brings me to the case
of Zachariah, the skipper of the Heavenly
Best. He was a Newf un'lander. J^either
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

SHIPS IN PERIL 33

Heavenly Best 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 Best, too
light in ballast to withstand a gusty breeze,
was groping through the fog for harbour
from a gale which threatened a swift de-
scent. 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.

34 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

" Is you sure, skipper ? " asked the cook.

" Sure," said Zachariah.

The Heomenly Best was in desperate case.
She was running in — pursuing an unfalter-
ing 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, peer-
ing 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 Hecuvenly
Best 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.

SHIPS IN PERIL 35

"JSToa, b'y," the skipper answered, "but
I'll get there, whatever."

The nose of the Heavenly Best 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 Skip-
per Zachariah. Three times the Heavenly
Rest ran in and out. Then she sighted
Dane's Eock, 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, forbid-
ding form to port and starboard. The

36 DR. GEENFELL'S PARISH

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.

TV

DESPERA TE 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 pre-
scribed medicines of the most curious de-
scription, 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 Newfound-
land coast, where he lived a hermit, verily
37

38 DE. GEENFELL^S PAEISH

believing, it may be, in the glory of bis
call and in the blessed efficacy of bis min-
istrations ; bis cure for consumption — it was
a tragic failure, in one case, at least — was a
bull's beart, dried and powdered and ad-
ministered witb faitb and regularity. Else-
where there was a man, stricken witb a
mortal ailment, who, upon the recom-
mendation of a kindly neighbour, regu-
larly 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, unhap-
pily, as he has said, "the wee feller
choked hisself t' death," notwithstand-
ing. 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.

DESPERATE NEED 39

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.

" / never has none," said he, in the fashion
of superior fellows.

•' Nar a one. No, zu?' ! 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 New-
foundland government did provide a phy-
sician— of a sort. Every summer he was
sent north with the mail-boat, which made
not more than six trips, touching here and

40 DK. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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; other-
wise the folk brought the sick aboard,
where they were painstakingly treated or
not, as the doctors humour went. The
government seemed never to inquire too
minutely into the qualifications and char-
acter 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

DESPERATE NEED 41

day, I am told ; and when at last the
mail-boat came, the man's skipper put
out in glad haste to fetch the govern-
ment 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 "

"Whatl" 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.

42 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

The government had provided for the
transportation of sick fishermen from the
Labrador coast to their homes in Newfound-
land; these men were of the great New-
foundland 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 con-
sumptive son aboard — a young lad, with but
a few weeks of life left. The boy wanted
his mother, who was at home in Newfound-
land.

" Ay, he's fair sicTc 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."

DESPERATE NEED 43

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 Lab-
rador 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 shift-
less fellow and his wife had never an ink-

4:4: DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

ling 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 sur-
prising phlegm ; doubtless he slept as sound,
if not as warm, as before. There was no
more wood to be had ; so he burnt the fur-
niture, every stick of it, and when that was
gone, began on the frame of his house — a
turf hut, builded under a kindly cliff, shel-
tered 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

DESPEEATE NEED 45

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.

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

46 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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, un-
fortunately, he had no more than four dol-
lars; 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, unresentf ully, 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 inci-
dents are true. I set them down here

DESPERATE NEED 47

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 no-
ble 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.

A HELPING HAND

WHILE the poor "liveyeres" and
Newfoundland fishermen thus de-
pended upon the mail-boat doc-
tor and their own strange inventions for re-
lief, "Wilfred Grenfell, this well-born, Ox-
ford-bred young Englishman, was walking
the London hospitals. He was athletic, ad-
venturous, 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 Taber-
nacle 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 noth-
ing violent in this — no fevered, ill-judged
determination to martyr himself at all costs.
It was a quiet resolve to make the best of
48

A HELPING HAND 49

his life — which he would have done at any
rate, I think, for he was a young English-
man of good breeding and the finest im-
pulses. At once he cast about for " some
way in which he could satisfy the aspira-
tions 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,
"7'm not a martyr."

So he found what he sought. After ap-
plying certain revolutionary ideas to Sun-

60 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

day-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 JSTational Mission to
Deep Sea Fishermen, and established the
medical mission to the fishermen of the
North Sea. When that work was organ-
ized— 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, pov-
erty, oppression, and disease ; for he is bit-
terly intolerant of those things. And

" It's been jolly good fun 1 " says he.

A HELPING HAND 51

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 heen doing
since f " Dr. Grenfell might with pro-
priety 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.

Keverance 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

52 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

plase com as quick as you can to save life
I remains yours truely.

Docker, — Please wel you send me som-
ting 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 gain-
ing 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 an3^thing 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

A HELPING HAND 53

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 New-
foundland coast. There is another, well-
equipped and commodious, at Battle Har-
bour— 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 coura-
geous young physician, Newfoundland-born,
who went six hundred miles up the coast by
dog-team in the dead of winter, finding shel-
ter where he might, curing whom he could

64 DE. GEENFELL'S PAEISH

— 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 English-
man, who goes about in an open boat, what-
ever 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.

1

H|BlHMiiiun

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 noth-
ing, 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. N'ext season he appeared
with a little steam-launch, the Princess May
— her beam was eight feet ! — in which he
55

5(5 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

not only journeyed from St. Johns to Lab-
rador, 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 set-
tlements 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 voy-
age, 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

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 im-
patient of delay, fretted by inaction ; a gale
is the wind for him — a wind to take him

FAITH AND DUTY 57

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,

58 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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, what-
ever 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, an-
grily, *' at the end of the cruise ! "

The engineer pleaded for another chance.
He was denied. From day to day he re-
newed 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.

" Yery well," said the doctor to the en-
gineer ; " I'll make this agreement with you.
If ever again you knock down the cook, I'll

FAITH AND DUTY 59

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 bar-
ren island or a frequented harbour, if ever
again the cook tempted him beyond endur-
ance.

" I'll stand by it, sir," he said, neverthe-
less ; " 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, in-

60 DR. GEENFELL'S PARISH

deed, in thick, wild weather, the doctor him-
self thought the little craft would go down ;
but she is now happily superannuated, car-
rying the mail in the quieter waters of Ham-
ilton Inlet. Next came the BirDonald — 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 inconsider-
ate ; 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 op-
portunity for doing a good deed — not if he

FAITH AND DUTY 61

dawdles in the harbours when a gale is
abroad, bat 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 doc-
tor known to the Esquimaux and poor " live-
yeres " 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 impa-
tient sigh. " The season's late. We must
get along."

We fell in with him at Ked Kay in the

62 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 oAvn 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 Bos-
ton, a specialist, for whom he had been wait-
ing.

" I see youVe 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 Har-
bour Hospital, waiting for our good friend
from Boston," said the doctor, briskly.
"I'm in a hurry. Oh, yes, I'm going
out ! "

FAITH AND DUTY 63

" 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 un-
til 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, diflficult
passage, and dropped anchor off the mission
wharf.

64 DE. GRENFELUS PARISH

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, Ho
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 ? "

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

FAITH AND DUTY 65

very far from being a dare-devil; though
he is, to be sure, a man altogether un-
afraid ; it seems to me that his heart can
never have known the throb of fear. Per-
haps that is in part because he has a blessed
lack of imagination, in part, perhaps, be-
cause 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 some-
thing 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

6Q DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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.

D

YII

THE LiyEYERE

OCTOE GKEISTFELL'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 New-
foundland "outporter" — the small fisher-
man of the remoter coast, who must depend
wholly upon his hook and line for subsist-
ence. 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.

67

68 DE. GRENFELUS PARISH

" 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 deso-
lation. 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, every-
where 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 for-
bidding ; few explorers have essayed adven-
ture 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

THE LIVEYERE 69

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 Lab-
rador seas in the fishing season — an adven-
turous, 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 Chid-
ley. 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 pos-
terity ; the saving circumstance is the very
isolation of the dwelling-place — no man

YO DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

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, bear-
ing 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

THE LIVEYERE 71

know the pinch of famine ; but some — the
really well-to-do — are clear of the over-
shadowing dread of it. The " livey eres " 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 de-
gree 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 white-
washed 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 dissolu-
tion by famine.

72 DE. GRENFELL'S PARISH

"Sure, zur, last winter," a stout young
fellow boasted, " we had all the grease us
wanted ! "

It is related of a thrifty settler named
OUiver, 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 — Avhich 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 sup-
port the lives of all, he returned home, sent

74 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

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 night-
mare 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 numer-

THE LIYEYERE ^5

ous 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 depreda-
tion 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,

76 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

crying : " Look out ! The harses is comin ' ! "
The caribou are too far inland for most of
the settlers ; but at various seasons (exclud-
ing 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.

]^otwithstanding 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 ice-
bergs drift southward, scraping the coast as
they go, and patches of snow lie in the hol-
lows 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

THE LIYEYERE Y7

— 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 bag-
gage, not only to escape the winds and bit-
ter 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 ther-
mometer frequently falls to fifty degrees be-
low zero, which, as you may be sure, is ex-
ceedingly cold near the sea. IN'or can a man
do much heavy work in the woods, for the
perspiration freezes under his clothing. Im-
poverished families have no stoves — merely
an arrangement of flat stones, with an open-
ing in the roof for the escape of the smoke,

78 DE. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 sta-
tioned among the whites beyond Battle Har-
bour, 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. Gren-
fell tells of landing late one night in a lonely
harbour where three "couples wanted marry-
ing." They had waited many years for the
opportunity. It chanced that the doctor was

THE LIVEYEEE T9

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 relig-
ious turn of mind — his creed as harsh and
gloomy as the land he lives in ; he is super-
stitious as a savage as well, and an incorri-
gible 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."

80 DK. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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, emphatic-
ally. " 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 sports-
man 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 LIVEYERE

81

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 inscrip-
tions, are all, in their way, eloquent :

O/ARA ft

OlVJhB. FOl^rfr
HACf*5l ftdf

VAR^ tioQe^

" Sarah Combe died the fourth of August, 1881, aged
31 years. ' '

82 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 yonr lost tis my
Etamel 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 elo-
quent of sorroviT and of love. The Lab-
rador " liveyere " is kin with the whole
wide world.

YIII
IV/TH 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 — build-
ing 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
83

84 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 pur-
pose, 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. What-
ever 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

WITH THE FLEET 85

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 deter-
mines. Every man has his chance. John
Smith o' Twillingate provisions the Luchy
Queen and gives her to the penniless Skip-
per 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 ! HeHl 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 disap-
pointment! It is a great lottery of hope
and fortune.

86 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

When, at last, word comes south that the
ice is clearing from the coast, the vessels
spread their little wings to the first favour-
ing 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 Stratlicona
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'."

WITH THE FLEET 87

"'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 hiows how f sail I "

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 "f sail."
The Newfoundland government, niggardly
and utterly independable when the good of
the fisherfolk is concerned, of whatever com-
plexion the government may chance to be,
but prodigal to an extraordinary degree
when individual self-interests are at stake —

88 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

this is a delicate way of putting an unpleas-
ant truth, — keeps no light burning beyond
the Strait of Belle Isle ; the best it does, I
believe, is to give wrecked seamen free pas-
sage home. Under these difficult circum-
stances, no seamen save ]S"ewfoundlanders,
who are the most skillful and courageous of
all, could sail that coast : and they only be-
cause they are born to follow the sea — there
is no escape for them — and are bred to sail-
ing from their earliest years.

" What you going to be when you grow
up ? " I once asked a lad on the far north-
east coast.

He looked at me in vast astonishment.

" What you going to he^ what you going
to ^," 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

WITH THE FLEET 89

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 cap-
tain of a coastal boat on the Newfoundland
shore — who takes his steamer into a ticklish
harbour of a thick, dark night, when every-
thing is black ahead and roundabout, steer-
ing only by the echo of the ship's whistle !
There is another, a confident seaman, a
bluff, high-spirited fellow, who was once de-
layed by bitter winter weather — an inky
night, with ice about, the snow flying, the
seas heavy with frost, the wind blowingagale.

" 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

90 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 com-
fort. But the underling at the head office
misinterpreted the message.

"What do we pay you for?" he tele-
graphed.

So the captain took the ship out to sea.
Men say that she w^ent 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

WITH THE FLEET 91

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 favoura-
ble 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.

92 DE. GRENFELL'S PARISH

It is in this scramble that many a skipper
makes his great mistake. I was talking
with a disconsolate young fellow in a north-
ern 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 e37^es 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^ out o' that berth next marnin'!
An' he'll load," he groaned, "afore the
week's out ! "

' A quintal is, roughly, a hundred pounds. One hun-
dred quintals of green fish are equal, roughly, to thirty
of dry, which, at $3, would amount to $90.

WITH THE FLEET 93

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 har-
bour 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

94 DH. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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,^ 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 toil-
some than lives lived elsewhere, he will
grant you something.

" Oh, ay," he'll drawl, " when the fish is
runnin', His 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 midsum-
mer months ; but that when, late in the fall,
the skiff puts out to the trap at dawn, it is

1 A "clever hand" can split— that is, clean— thirty-
fish in a minute.

WITH THE FLEET 95

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 " be-
fore the trap is reached.

"'Tis not hard, now," said he. "But,
oh — 00 — 00 ! when the big nor'easters blow !
Oo — 00 ! " 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 com-
prised of from ^ve to ten men, with, occa-
sionally, 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

96 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 sum-
mer's work. One-half of that is suflacient
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

WITH THE FLEET 97

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. Gren-
fell 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

98 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

who did not quite fit the sleeping place as-
signed 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
^ve 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 Govern-
ments ! " There was an austere old Chris-
tian who on a Sunday morning left his trap
— ^his whole fortune — lie in the path of a

WITH THE FLEET 99

destroying iceberg rather than desecrate
the Lord's day by taking it out of the
water. Both political parties in New-
foundland shamelessly deceive the credu-
lous 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 main-
land, 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

100 DE. GRENFELL'S PAEISH

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.

His coflSn was knocked together on the

1

^

^

^-^B

WITH THE FLEET 101

forward deck next morning — with Carbo-
near 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 harvest-
ing of a field of grain is good to look upon ;
but I think that there can be no more stir-
ring 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
I^orwegian harbours must have been. The
lucky skippers strut the village roads with

102 DE. GEENFELL'S PAEISH

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-mak-
ings. There is great rejoicing — feasting,
merrymaking, hearty thanksgiving.
Thanks be to God, the fleet's home !

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 peo-
ple 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,
103

104 DE. GEENFELL'S PAEISH

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 wist-
fully 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

ON THE FRENCH SHORE 105

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 lit-
tle 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 hun-
dred thousand, which includes the city-folk
of St. Johns and an amazing proportion of
babies and tender lads, about fifty-five thou-
sand 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.

106 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

" 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 preju-
dice ; 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

ON THE FRENCH SHORE 107

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 employ-
ment: 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, com-
puted 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 mo-
ment ; 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

108 DR. GRENFELL'S PAEISH

in the dusk, he lies off shore, fishing — toss-
ing 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 adven-
ture ; nor has he the expectation of a proud re-
turn to lighten his toil. In the little punt
he has made with his own hands he is for-
ever riding an infinite expanse, which, in
" fish weather," is melancholy, or threaten-
ing, 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 aim-
less musing, or, even less happily, to ponder-
ing certain dark mysteries of the soul ; and
so it comes about that the " mad-house 't
Saint Johns" is inadequate to accommo-
date 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 fisher-

ON THE FEENCH SHORE 109

man 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 hav-
ing 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 ; some-
times 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, how-
ever, the hook-and-line man fishes his eighty
years of life, and dies in his bed as cheer-
fully as he has lived and as poor as he was
born.

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 " — feel-
ing for direction, chancing the steps, splash-
ing through pools of water, tripping over
sharp rocks. The whitewashed cottages of
the village, set on the hills, were like the
110

r

^

THE WHITEWASHED COTTAGES ON THE HILLS"

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 111

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 Duck worthy, that pious giant,
who had been late beating in from the fish-
ing 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.

"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

112 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 113

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 gen-
tle hand — a mighty hand, toil-worn and mis-
shapen, 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 fail-
ure that he might afterwards sustain him-
self with the thought that no man is invul-
nerable. "Sure, we've all besettin' sins.
When we do be snatched from the burnin'
brands, fe'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

114 DR. GRENFELL^S PARISH

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 over-
board into the burnin' lake. I were a won-
derful 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 strug-
gle. " I'll beat un," he repeated, clinching
his great hands. " I will I "

SOME OUTPOET FOLK 115

Elisha bade us good-night with a solemn
face. A little smile — a poor, frightened
little smile of tender feeling for us — flick-
ered 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 rust-
ling the leaves of a sickly bush under the
window — coaxing them to hopeful whis-
perings. I fancied that the sea was all blue
and rippling, and that the birds were flitting
through the sunlight, chirping their sym-
pathy 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.

116 DR. GEENFELUS PARISH

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, look-
ing 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 xaevman.'^^

" 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 ? "

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 117

"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 hnows 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' "

118 DR. GEENFELL'S PARISH

" 'Tis said," said Aunt Ruth, with a pro-
digious 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 ^ 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 jeal-
ous o' the mermaids. No, sir — sure, no."

It is difficult to convey an adequate con-
ception of the barrenness of this coast. If
^ A scolding.

I

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 119

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 pro-
duces.

" 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 there-
abouts, which had been "won from the
wilderness " by the labour of several gener-
ations ; and it was owned by eleven fam-
ilies. This was not a garden made by gath-
ering 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

120 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

achievement as he waited for my outburst
of congratulation.

The potatoes, owing to painstaking fer-
tilization with small fish, had attained ad-
mirable 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.

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 121

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 flood-
ing all — were far, far beyond this man's im-
agination. 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 — OP Zeb tottered up

122 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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.
OP 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 hearten-
ing 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 ? "

" 'Tis many year, zur," said Uncle Zeb,

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 123

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."

IJncle 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 consump-
tion, 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 ^ 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.
^ Some miles distant.

124 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

" 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

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 125

solemn warnings — and especially of that
little valley down which the gusts came,
no man knew from where. He had im-
parted certain secrets concerning the
whereabouts of gulls' nests and juniper-
berry patches, for I had won his con-
fidence. 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 Blud-
gell kept the "surliest dog t' the har-
bour," 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 swilinV

* Sealing.

126 DR. GRENFELL^S PARISH

(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 won-
dered, 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 in-
teresting, though I had to admit that
they might not be profitable in certain cases.

SOME OUTPOET FOLK 127

" 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. " Ter-
rible 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 1 They do say 'tis St.
Johns. But, sure, zur, they must be some-
thing 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

128 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 win-
dows 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 9, punt was reel-
ing 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 nar-
rows to the sheltered water, and I sighed in
sympathy with the man who was then furl-
ing his wet and fluttering sail, for I, too,
had experienced the relief of sweeping from
that waste of grasping waves to the sanctu-
ary 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

SOME OUTPOKT FOLK 129

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.

130 DR. GEENFELL\S PARISH

"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 rag-
ing. 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

SOME OUTPORT FOLK 131

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 break-
ers, and to the wind, as it ran past, leaping
from sea to wilderness ; and my spirit felt
the coming of the dark.

XI

WINTER PRACTICE

IT is, then, to the outporter, to the men
of the fleet and to the Labrador live-
yere that Doctor Grenfell devotes him-
self. The hospital at Indian Harbour is the
centre of the Labrador activity ; the hos-
pital at Sto Anthony is designed to care for
the needs of the French shore folk ; the hos-
pital at Battle Harbour — the first estab-
lished, 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, re-
sponding 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.
132

WINTER PRACTICE 133

Often, indeed, in cases of emergency, opera-
tions 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 run-
ning 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

134 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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 hun-
dred miles back again ; it takes a man of
unchangeable devotion to undertake it !

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 with-
out them ; and it must be said that they are
magnificent animals, capable of heroic

WINTER PRACTICE 135

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

136 DR. GHENFELL'S PARISH

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 bed-
side. It had been a dark night — black dark :
with the road precipitous, the dogs uncon-
trollable, the physician in great haste. The
doctor thought, many a time, that there
would be " more than one broken limb " by

WINTER PRACTICE 137

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 chloro-
form 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 call-
ing 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

138 DE. GRENFELL'S PARISH

— a two days' journey — the doctor fell in
with a dog-train bearing the mail. And
the mail-man had a letter — a hasty sum-
mons to a man in great pain some sixty
miles in another direction. It was impossi-
ble to respond. " That call," says the doctor,
sadly, " owing to sheer impossibility, was not
answered." It w^as 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 suc-
coured. 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 w^as again intercepted. It was a
young man, this time, whose mother lay

WINTER PRACTICE 139

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

" Could you bear word," said the woman,
"f Mister Elliot t' come bury my boy?
He said he'd come, sir ; but now my little
lad has been lying dead, here, since Janu-
ary."

It was then early in March. Mr. Elliot
was a Protestant fisherman who was accus-
tomed 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,

UO DE. GEENFELL'S PARISH

healthy, embryo fisherman, light-haired and
blue-eyed, a veritable celt."

"And what's the matter with him?"
was the physician's question.

" HeVe 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 des-
perately impoverished — as much by igno-
rance 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

WINTER PEACTICE 141

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 be-
fore 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

142 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

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 travel-
ling 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 al-
ready 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.

WINTER PRACTICE 143

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 norVest
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 ex-
perience, 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 run-
ning as ever I had ; for my clothing was
growing to resemble the armour of an an-
cient knight more and more, every jscrd,
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

144 DR. GRENFELUS PARISH

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!

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 Strath-

m

THE DOCTOR ON A WINTER'S JOURNEY

WINTER PRACTICE 145

cona ; conceive that the folk of two thou-
sand 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 know-
ing the desolate land — without observing
the emaciated bodies of the children —
without hearing the cries of distress — it is
impossible adequately to realize the bless-
ing his devotion has brought to the coast.

XII
THE CHAMPION

THE Deep-sea Mission is not con-
cerned 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, appar-
ently, 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 hos-
pitals 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
146

THE CHAMPION 147

doctor has established cooperative stores
and various small industries. The result
has been twofold : the regeneration of sev-
eral communities, and an outbreak of hatred
and dishonest abuse on the part of the trad-
ers, who have too long fattened on the iso-
lation and miseries of the people. The co-
operative 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 opera-
tions, 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 BtTathcona
and most generously operated at Battle
Harbour. The mission gathered the pa-

148 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

tients to the hospital from far and near be-
fore 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.

THE CHAMPION 149

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
JSTewfoundland. He did a great wrong;
and when the news of it came to the ears of
the mission-doctor, the anchor of the Strath-
cona 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-doc-
tor should interfere in the affairs of one so
rich who knew the politicians at St. Johns.
But the mission-doctor was also a magis-
trate.

" I say," said he, deliberately, " that you
must pay one thousand dollars and confess
your sin."

The man cursed the doctor with great

150 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

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.

"Yery 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 contin-
ued, "you will appear at the church at seven
o'clock and confess your sin before the con-
gregation ; and next week you will pay the
money as I have said."

" I'll see you in h — 11 first ! " replied the
man, defiantly.

At the morning service the doctor an-

THE CHAMPION 151

nounced that a sinful man would confess his
sin before them all that night. There was
great excitement. Other men might be pre-
vailed upon to make so humiliating a con-
fession, 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 ;

152 DR. GEENFELL'S PARISH

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 peo-
ple should beware ? "

"lam."

" 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 peo-
ple, 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.

THE CHAMPION 153

This relentless judge, on a stormy day of
last July, carried many bundles ashore at
Cartwright, in Sandwich Bay of the Labra-
dor. The wife of the Hudson Bay Com-
pany'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 sin-
cerity 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.

154 DR. GRENFELL'S PARISH

Are they not afraid to play with these pretty
things ? "

"They are^^ she laughed. "They use
them for ornaments. But that doesn't mat-
ter. 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
jpaint off her dolly ! "

Thus and all the time, in storm and sun-
shine, 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 peo-
ple of the world would but give a little more

THE CHAMPION 155

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."

Doctor Luke
of The habrador

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 charac-
ters are painted in with bold, wide strokes. . . . Un-
like most first novels, ' Doctor Luke ' waxes strongel
as it progresses." — N. T. E'vening Post.

James Mac Arthur^ 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 character-
ization. Nothing more individual, and in its own way
more powerful, has been done in American fiction. . . .
The story is a work of art." — The Congregationalht.

Joseph B. Gilder, of ^he 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 Booklovers 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 pro-
duced by a native of Canada." — Toronto Globe*

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