ney--the
normal freight route. Month after month went by, and it never
appeared. Year followed year, and still we searched for that
searchlight. At length, after two and a half years, it suddenly
arrived, having been "delayed on the way." Had it been provisions or
clothing or drugs, or almost anything else, of course, it would have
been useless. It has proved to us one of the almost _de luxe_
additions to a Mission steamer.

* * * * *

For a long time I had felt the need of some place in St. John's where
work for fishermen could be carried on, and which could be also
utilized as a place of safety for girls coming to that city from other
parts of the island. My attention was called one day to the fact that
liquor was being sent to people in the outports C.O.D., by a barrel of
flour which was being lowered over the side of the mail steamer rather
too quickly on to the ice. As the hard bump came, the flour in the
barrel jingled loudly and leaked rum profusely from the compound
fracture. When our sober outport people went to St. John's, as they
must every year for supplies, they had only the uncomfortable schooner
or the street in which to pass the time. There is no "Foyer des
Pecheurs"; no one wanted fishermen straight from a fishing schooner in
the home; and in those days there were no Camp Community Clubs. As one
man said, "It is easy for the parson to tell us to be good, but it is
hard on a wet cold night to be good in the open street" and nowhere to
go, and harder still if you have to seek shelter in a brightly lighted
room, where music was being played. The boarding-houses for the
fishermen, where thousands of our young men flocked in the spring to
try for a berth in the seal fishery, were ridiculous, not to say
calamitous. Lastly, unsophisticated girls coming from the outports ran
terrible risks in the city, having no friends to direct and assist
them; and the Institute which we had in mind was to comprise also a
girls' lodging department. No provision was made for the accommodation
of crews wrecked by accident, and our Institute has already proved
invaluable to many in such plights.

Seeing the hundreds of craft and the thousands of fishermen, and the
capital and interest vested against us as prohibitionists, it would
have been obviously futile to put up a second-rate affair in a back
street. It would only be sneered at as a proselytizing job. I had
almost forgotten to mention that