ap is Submerged a Hundred Yards or so from Shore" 130

"NEXT" 172

"Please Look at My Tongue, Doctor" 172

The Hospital Ship, STRATHCONA 220

"I Have a Crew Strong Enough to Take You into My District" 234

I

THE SANDS OF DEE

The first great adventure in the life of our hero occurred on the
twenty-eighth day of February in the year 1865. He was born that day.
The greatest adventure as well as the greatest event that ever comes
into anybody's life is the adventure of being born.

If there is such a thing as luck, Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, as his
parents named him, fell into luck, when he was born on February
twenty-eighth, 1865. He might have been born on February twenty-ninth
one year earlier, and that would have been little short of a
catastrophe, for in that case his birthdays would have been separated
by intervals of four years, and every boy knows what a hardship it
would be to wait four years for a birthday, when every one else is
having one every year. There _are_ people, to be sure, who would like
their birthdays to be four years apart, but they are not boys.

Grenfell was also lucky, or, let us say, fortunate in the place where
he was born and spent his early boyhood. His father was Head Master of
Mostyn House, a school for boys at Parkgate, England, a little
fishing village not far from the historic old city of Chester. By
referring to your map you will find Chester a dozen miles or so to the
southward of Liverpool, though you may not find Parkgate, for it is so
small a village that the map makers are quite likely to overlook it.

Here at Parkgate the River Dee flows down into an estuary that opens
out into the Irish Sea, and here spread the famous "Sands of Dee,"
known the world over through Charles Kingsley's pathetic poem, which
we have all read, and over which, I confess, I shed tears when a boy:

O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the Sands o' Dee;
The western wind was wild and dank wi' foam,
And all alone went she.

The creeping tide came up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see;
The blinding mist came down and hid the land--
And never home came she.

Oh i