tive of inebriety, and at times gave rise to the
anxious sensations one experiences when one sees a poor victim of the
saloon returning home along a pavement near much traffic.

While in England we had received letters from the north coast of
Newfoundland, begging us to again include their shores in our visits,
and especially to establish a definite winter station at St. Anthony.
The people claimed, and rightly, to be very poor. One man with a large
family, whom I knew well, as he had acted guide for me on hunting
expeditions, wrote: "Come and start a station here if you can. My
family and I are starving." Dr. Aspland wrote that every one was
strongly in favour of our taking up a Mission hospital in North
Newfoundland. We felt that we should certainly reach a very large
number of people whom we now failed to touch, and that careful
inquiries should be made.

Life on the French shore has been a struggle with too many families to
keep off actual starvation. For instance, one winter at St. Anthony a
man with a large family, and a fine, capable, self-respecting fellow,
was nine days without tasting any flour or bread, or anything besides
roast seal meat. Others were even worse off, for this man was a keen
hunter, and with his rickety old single-barrel, boy's muzzle-loading
gun used to wander alone far out over the frozen sea, with an empty
stomach as well, trying to get a seal or a bird for his family. At
last he shot a square flipper seal and dragged it home. The rumour of
his having killed it preceded his arrival, and even while skinning it
a crowd of hungry men were waiting for their share of the fat. Not
that any was due to them, but here there is a delightful
semi-community of goods.

Fish was then only fetching two or three dollars a hundredweight,
salted and dried. The price of necessities depended on the conscience
of the individual supplier and the ignorance of the people. The truck
system was universal; thrift at a discount--and the sin of Ananias an
all too common one; that is, taking supplies from one man and
returning to him only part of the catch. The people in the north end
of Newfoundland and Labrador were very largely illiterate; the
sectarian schools split up the grants for teachers--as they still most
unfortunately do--and miserable salaries, permitting teachers only for
a few months at a time, were the rule.

I had once spent a fortnight at St. Anthony, having taken refuge there
in the Princess May