e warmth
of the occasion the weather turned bitterly cold, the harbour "caught
over," and for a week we were prisoners. When at last the young ice
broke up again, we made an attempt to cross the Straits, but sea and
wind caught us halfway and forced us to run back, this time in the
thick fog. The Straits' current had carried us a few miles in the
meanwhile--which way we did not know--and the land, hard to make out
as it was in the fog, was white with snow. However, with the storm
increasing and the long dark night ahead, we took a sporting chance,
and ran direct in on the cliffs. How we escaped shipwreck I do not
know now. We suddenly saw a rock on our bow and a sheer precipice
ahead, twisted round on our heel, shot between the two, and we knew
where we were, as that is the only rock on a coast-line of twenty
miles of beach--but there really is no room between it and the cliff.

All along the coast that year we noticed a change of attitude toward
professional medical aid. Confidence in the wise woman, in the seventh
son and his "wonderful" power, in the use of charms like green
worsted, haddock fins, or scrolls of prayer tied round the neck, had
begun to waver. The world talks still of a blind man made to see
nineteen hundred years ago; but the coast had recently been more
thrilled by the tale of a blind man made to see by "these yere
doctors." One was a man who for seventeen years had given up all hope;
and two others, old men, parted for years, and whose first occasion of
seeing again had revealed to them the fact that they were brothers.

Some lame had also been made to walk--persons who had abandoned hope
quite as much as he who lay for forty years by the Pool of Siloam, or
for a similar period at the Golden Gate.

One of my first operations had been rendered absolutely inescapable by
the great pain caused by a tumour in the leg. The patient had insisted
on having five men sit on her while the operation proceeded, as she
did not believe it was right to be put to sleep, and, moreover, she
secretly feared that she might not wake up again. But now the
conversion of the coast had proceeded so far that many were pleading
for a winter doctor. At first we did not think it feasible, but my
colleague, Dr. Willway, finally volunteered to stay at Battle Harbour.
We loaded him up with all our spare assets against the experiment, the
hospital being but very ill-equipped for an Arctic winter. When the
following summer we appro