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 can 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- 
