ore of the St. Lawrence, west of
the narrow strip, is also called Labrador--but it belongs to Canada.
Generally "Labrador" is used for the part that belongs to
Newfoundland.

"Labrador" itself is a queer word. It is Portuguese. It means a yeoman
farmer. The name was given to Greenland in the first half of the
sixteenth century by a farmer from the Azores who was first to see
that lonesome, chilly country. Thence the name was moved over to the
peninsula between Hudson Bay and the Atlantic.

Cabot sailed along the coast in 1498, but the interior remained unseen
by white men till the Hudson's Bay Company began to plant their
trading-stations and send their agents for furs in 1831.

Jacques Cartier said Labrador was "the land God gave to Cain," and
that there was "not one cartload of earth on the whole of it." Along
the coast are mountains rising to 7,000 or even 8,000 feet. There are
many lakes inland, 50 to 100 miles in length. Hamilton Inlet is 150
miles long, and from two to 30 miles wide. The Hamilton River which
empties into it, in twelve miles descends 760 feet, with a single drop
of 350 feet at the Grand Falls, the greatest in North America,
surpassing even Niagara.

[Illustration: LABRADOR]

The population is about 14,500 in more than half a million square
miles. There are some 3,500 Indians, 2,000 Eskimos, and 9,000 whites
(along the coast and at the Hudson's Bay posts).

It was to such a "parish" that Grenfell came in 1892, that he might
give the fishermen the benefit of his surgical knowledge and practical
experience acquired not only on the land but aboard the tossing ships
in the North Sea.

A ninety-ton boat is a tiny craft in which to make the voyage across
the Atlantic. Grenfell must have known just how Columbus felt, four
hundred years ago, when he said to the sailors of his tiny caravels
"Sail on! sail on!"

First there were head winds for eleven days.

"Wonder if the wind's ever goin' to quit blowin' against us!" muttered
a sailor, as he coiled a rope to make a bed for a dog in the stern.
"I'm about fed up with this kind o' thing."

The man to whom he spoke was in his bare feet, washing the deck with
the hose. "What does anybody ever wanna go to Labrador for, anyhow?"
he grumbled back. "It's a lot better in the North Sea. More sociable.
You get letters from home an' tobacco regular. An' you can see
somebody once in a while."

"Shore leave's no good to a fellow in Labrador," the first m