auld kirk"---there were "in't but few."

William Bompas went North in 1865 and stayed there forty years, coming
out only twice. On the first of these occasions he returned to England
to be elevated to the episcopate.

The only medical training the Bishop had under gone was a short course
in the treatment of snowblindness, and this when he went to England for
his consecration. This is a form of blindness that causes great
suffering among the Indians, and the Bishop had himself been stricken
with it on several occasions. On one of these, stumbling painfully at
every step, he was led by an Eskimo boy for seventy-five miles.
Writing of his agonies, he says: "They are delights. The first
foot-prints on earth made by our risen Saviour were the nail-marks of
suffering, and for the spread of the gospel, too, am prepared to
suffer."

Like Stringer, Bompas also endured frequent starvation, but seldom
spoke of it as a personal happening, but rather as applying to
others--a virtue most hard and difficult to be practised. Writing
about it to a friend in England, he said: "Horses were killed for food
and furs eaten at several of the posts. The Indians had to eat a good
many of their beaver skins."

Another man who endured the privations of the pioneer in this district
is the present Bishop of Keewatin, Joseph Lofthouse.

The most interesting, and certainly the most romantic story of his
career, is that of his marriage. His sweetheart, a young English girl,
was due to arrive on the yearly vessel of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Lofthouse travelled several hundred miles to meet her, but found she
had not come, being unavoidably detained in England. The following
summer he made the same journey, but this time as the vessel pulled up
the harbour, he was able to single out the lassie's face on the deck.
Yes, sir! if you had lived among Eskimos and Indians all these years,
you, too, would tremble and choke in the throat at the ship's rope hit
the mooring-post.

But now the young couple found themselves in as trying a predicament as
the Israelites with the sea in front, Pharaoh's army behind, and
unscalable rocks on either side. In a word, there was no minister to
marry them. Things looked badly for them, and the lassie was thinking
of returning home, when it suddenly occurred to the captain that, on
the open sea, according to law, he was entitled to act as a magistrate.
It was not long till the good ship slipped her moorings a