228 LABRADOR 



and for firing the people must depend on what driftwood 

 is washed up, or else on seal-fat lamps. The average tem- 

 perature for the year is far below freezing. One mail a 

 year is the most the people <?an ever expect. They can 

 reach and talk to no Europeans, except possibly by a long 

 and dangerous shore journey taken once in the winter. 

 In sickness or accident there is no skilled help. Yet these 

 patient missionaries have just selected this spot for a 

 station. 



The missionary in charge at present is a splendid speci- 

 men of humanity, broad and strong far beyond the average 

 man, with merry blue eyes, and the abundant light hair of 

 a Viking. He has a capacity for work, and an accuracy 

 of mind rarely equalled. His hospitality and generous 

 manner toward strangers, along with all his other splendid 

 qualities, make him the ideal man for the environment. 

 One could imagine that he had dropped off an ancient 

 "war swan" and had persisted ever since those days on 

 these seemingly God-forsaken rocks. The man's scorn of 

 physical conditions, the hard things that he has moulded 

 to his will and use, the absolute happiness he always seems 

 to enjoy, have shown to me, each time I have visited the 

 station, how man, as God would have him be, towers above 

 his circumstances. One leaves the station regretting that 

 so few should be there to benefit, humbled and glad that 

 men of such type still live to adorn the human race. 

 Other thoughts, I confess, have risen to my mind in the 

 enervating palaces of some of those "more wealthy. " 



Few furs are caught there. The white fox and the polar 

 bear alone are not uncommon. The sight and smell of 

 seal and walrus blubber are everywhere. Fat is the meas- 



