08 at the mill we had built a new large schooner in honour
of that devoted friend of Labrador, our secretary in Boston, and had
named the vessel for her, the Emma E. White. She fetched Lloyd's full
bounty for an A 1 ship. This was a feather in our caps, since she was
designed and built by one of our own men, who was no "scholard,"
having never learned to read or write. Will Hopkins can take an axe
and a few tools into the green woods in the fall, and sail down the
bay in a new schooner in the spring when the ice goes. To see him
steaming the planking in the open in his own improvised boxes on the
top of six feet of snow made me stand and take off my hat to him. He
is no good at speech-making; he does not own a dress-suit, and he
cannot dance a tango; but he is quite as useful a citizen as some who
can, and his type of education is one which endears him to all. He
gave me the great pleasure of having our friend come sailing into St.
Anthony in the middle of a fine day, seated on the bow of her
namesake, the beautiful and valuable product of his skill, just when
we were all ready on the wharf to "sketch them both off," as our
people call taking a photograph.

Our increasing buildings being all of wood, and as the two largest
were full of either helpless sick people or an ever-increasing batch
of children, we wanted something safer than kerosene lamps to
illuminate the rooms. The people here had never seen electric light
"tamed," as it were, and to us it seemed almost too big a venture to
install a plant of our own. Home outfits were not common in those days
even in the States, and we feared in any case that we could not run it
regularly enough. No one except the head of the machine shop, a
Labrador boy and Pratt graduate, knew the first thing about
electricity, and he would not always be available.

However, with the help of friends we were able to purchase a hot-head
vertical engine to generate our current; for our near-by streams
freeze solid in winter. That engine has now been running for over ten
years, and has given us electricity in St. Anthony Hospital for
operating and X-ray work as well as all our lighting. Until he died,
it was run the greater part of the time by an Eskimo boy whom we had
brought down from the North Labrador, and who was convalescing from
empyema. The installation was efficiently done by a volunteer student
from the Pratt Institute, Mr. Hause.

On my lecture trip the previous winter a gentlem