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

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

VII

THE LIVEYERE

OCTOR GRENFELL'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 Newfoundland "outporter "-the small fisherman of the remoter coast, who must depend wholly upon his hook and line for subsistence. 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.

"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 desolation. 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, everywhere 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 forbidding; few explorers have essayed adventure 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

surviving only in the hollows and ravinesa 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 Labrador seas in the fishing season—an adventurous, 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 Chidley. 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 posterity; the saving circumstance is the very isolation of the dwelling-place-no man