THE ESKIMOS AND THE MISSION 



simple Gospel and caring for the people. I wondered 

 when I first went to Labrador, how some of those 

 Bible pictures, so familiar to us, could appeal to 

 a people living in so desolate a land. There are 

 no sheep in Labrador, no cows, no milk and honey 

 excepting the kind in tins ; no fruit-trees better than 

 the dwarfed brushwood that crawls upon the ground : 

 but the Eskimo is a man who is not much troubled 

 by doubts ; he takes his Bible literally, drinking in 

 its teaching with a child's simplicity; and, by the 

 use of pictures and careful explanations, the Bible 

 stories have become as real and helpful to the Eskimos 

 as they are to us. 



The Mission is educating the children : at every 

 station school is held on four days a week during the 

 winter months, and the children begin to attend after 

 their sixth birthday. Usually the smallest are taught 

 by an Eskimo ; a wise thing, for an Eskimo has the 

 knack of putting things in a way that the child mind 

 can grasp ; later, the missionary takes them in hand 

 and leads them from the stage of strokes and pot- 

 hooks and the spelling of queer syllables to real 

 writing and the reading of books, and even among 

 the mysteries of simple arithmetic. Reckoning is 

 difficult ; it is foreign to the Eskimo nature, so that 

 even the numerals have had to be imported ; there 

 are no numbers in the Eskimo language beyond 

 twenty, and the word for twenty is " a whole man 

 ten fingers and ten toes." But in spite of difficulties, 

 by the time the boy and girl leave school they can 

 reckon dollars and cents, and find their numbers in 

 the hymn-book; and as for reading and writing, 

 every Eskimo on the coast, over the age of twelve 

 or thirteen, can manage so much, and their knowledge 





