December 15, 1923. Dear Waldo: You who have sampled the salt breezes of the North on board my boat, have, I know, imbibed the spirit that actuates the belief that in a world like ours we can all be knights. I know that like ourselves, you look upon the world as a field of honor, and its only durable prizes the things that we can accomplish in it. You see the fun in it all—the real joie de vivre. Well, we are doing our best, and it is giving us a great return. We haven't lost the capacity to enjo

"I wonder if Jim is ever going to get back! My, isn't it an awful storm!" Wilfred Grenfell, then a small boy, stood at the window of his home in Cheshire, England, looking out across the sea-wall at the raging, seething waters of the Irish Sea. The wind howled and the snowflakes beat against the window-panes as if they were tiny birds that wanted to get in. "Mother," he pleaded, "can I put on my sweater and my rubber boots and go down on the beach and see if I can find Jim?" "Yes," said his moth

This Robin Hood kind of life in the open went on till Wilf was fourteen. Then he was sent away to Marlborough College—a boy's school which had 600 pupils. Marlborough is in the Chalk Hills of the Marlborough Downs, seventy-five miles west of London. The building, dating from 1843, is on the site of a castle of Henry I. The first day Wilf landed there he looked about him and felt pretty forlorn. "I wonder if I'll ever get to know all those boys?" he asked himself. When he was at home, he had a ro

from Yarmouth to Labrador in a ninety-ton ketch-rigged schooner. This wasn't such an abrupt change of base as it sounds, for it meant that the Royal Mission to the Deep Sea Fishermen, which works in the North Sea, had decided to send a "Superintendent" to the coast of the North Atlantic, east of Canada and north of Newfoundland, where many ships each summer went in quest of the cod. If you will look on the map, you will readily see how Labrador lies in a long, narrow strip along the coast from t

There was great excitement at the little village of St. Anthony, on the far northern tip of Newfoundland. Tom Bradley was coming back from a seal-hunt, and his big dogs Jim and Jack were helping him drag a flipper seal big enough to give a slice of the fat to every man, woman and child in the place. Tom had a large family, and for nine days they had tasted nothing but a little roasted seal meat. Finally Tom took his gun down from the nails over the door. It was a single-barrel muzzle-loader, mea

"Get out o' there, youse!" A big raw-boned fisherman with an oar in his hand came running up the stony beach at Hopedale. The door of the little Moravian church was open. So were the windows. And so were the mouths of a pack of dogs who were yowling their heads off and trying to kill each other inside the church. "That's just the way with them huskies!" panted Long Jim, as he stumbled up the slope. "Can't leave 'em be ten minutes without their gettin' into mischief. 'Tis a nice place they picked

When Dr. Grenfell first sailed his mission boat to the Eskimo settlements, the Eskimo swarmed aboard his little schooner, the Albert . They were singing a hymn the Moravian missionaries taught them. "What do you know about that?" said Sailor Bill to Sailor Jim. "Them fellers certainly can sing!" "Yes, an' they got a brass band," answered Jim. "Just hear 'em a-goin' it, over there on the shore when the wind sets our way. You'd sure think the circus was comin' to town! Hey there, where you goin',

There was an Eskimo boy named Pomiuk who lived in the far north of Labrador, at Nachoak Bay. Pomiuk had the regular sea-and-land training of the Eskimo boy. In summer his family lived in a skin tent, in winter they occupied an ice igloo. It is a fine art making one of those rounded domes—the curving blocks must be shaped and fitted exactly, so as to come out even at the top. Blubber in a stone dish supplied light and heat. If the air got too thick, father could thrust the handle of his dog-whip

In the lonely interior of Labrador in midsummer an old man sat on the rocky ground with a ring of Indians about him. He was "Labrador" Cabot of Boston. Year after year he had gone to Labrador to visit the Indian tribes and study their ways. He could talk the Indian language and understand what they said to him. "What's the matter with your leg?" asked the Chief, a big, strong fellow with keen eyes. "Can't you walk? We must get started if we want to find the deer." "I think I must have broken my

In April, 1908, Dr. Grenfell had the closest call of his life. Of course in April the ice and snow are still deep over the bays and forelands of Labrador and northern Newfoundland. There is not the slightest sign that spring with its flowers and mosquitoes is coming. All travel save by dog-team is at a standstill, and only a life-and-death message—such as Dr. Grenfell is constantly getting—is a reason for facing the howling winds and the driving snows of the blizzards that the bravest seamen and

No boat could come out from the shore through the sort of sea that was now running. The great pans of ice, rising and falling on the waves, were crashing and charging into the cliffs alongshore "like medieval battering-rams," and the white spray dashed high against the rocks with a sullen roar as of artillery. It would be necessary to skin some of the dogs and use their pelts for blankets, in order to escape freezing in the terrible cold of the oncoming night. Imagine how hard it was for their m

One day, as Grenfell was about to leave northern Labrador in his little steamer the Strathcona , a man came aboard with trouble in his eyes. It was the good-hearted Hudson's Bay agent. "Doctor," he pleaded, "old Tommy Mitchell's been comin' in every Saturday for two months, tryin' to get somethin' for his family. I've been givin' him twenty pounds of flour a week for himself and wife and six children. That's every shred they've got to live on. He hasn't a salmon or a codfish to give me, and he w

"Doctor, how do you catch the codfish? Do you use a hook and line, the same as father and I do when we go fishing in Long Island Sound?" The speaker was a New York boy who hadn't been north of Boston, until one summer his father let him go to St. John's for the sea-trip. There by great good luck he ran into the Doctor, who had come from St. Anthony in his little steamer the Strathcona . "You can catch codfish with a hook and line," explained the Doctor, "but it would take too long for the fisher

Harry had seen and heard many kinds of birds alongshore, of all sizes and colors, some flying in curious ways and some making very queer sounds, so he asked the Doctor to tell him about them. "The Labrador coast is one of the finest bird-nurseries anywhere," said the Doctor. "You can find about two hundred different kinds—if your eyes are sharp enough and your patience—and your shoes—hold out! "Of course they don't all live there the year round. Some of them are just summer boarders. "Maybe in a

Both on sea and land, Labrador animals have to be as tough as Labrador people to stand the hard life they must lead. Dr. Grenfell tells of a seal family he saw killed on an ice-pan about half the size of a tennis-court. They were surprised by four sealers, with wooden bats. Before they gave up their lives they put up a tremendous struggle. The father seal actually caught a club in his mouth and swung it from side to side with such violence that the sealers had to get off the pan. But at last he

Once I asked Dr. Grenfell if he was tired. His blue eyes lit up as if I had thrown salt into a fire. He threw his head back and said: "Tired? I was never tired in my life!" But I thought he was weary that September evening in 1919 when he sat with his legs unkinked to the cheerful blaze, in the big living-room of his comfortable house at St. Anthony. The wind can go whooping around that house all it likes and it never will get in unless it is invited. That house was nailed and shingled, doored a

Another trip was to the north, in January, over the thirty miles from St. Anthony to Cape Norman, to save a woman's life. It all looks so easy when you get out the map and measure it across white space. But when that white space is snow instead of paper, and there are thirty miles of it to flog through, instead of three inches under your hand—that, as Kipling would say, is another story. Over the telegraph line from Cape Norman to St. Anthony came a piteous message from a young fisherman. It sai

We have seen by this time that Grenfell does not rush slam-bang into danger for the mere sake of "the tumult and the shouting," like a soldier of fortune. Once he said to me: "I'm like these dogs. Every time they hear a fight going on at the other end of the village they feel that they have to get into it, and off they go, pell-mell. Whenever I hear of a good scrap in progress anywhere in the world, my first impulse is to drop everything else and get into the struggle. Then I realize that I'm se