"_bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him
forever!_"

We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her
great open platforms they looked up and stretched out their hands
neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and
the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly
beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of the night,
all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and
vanished, her song continuing. _Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart,
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him forever._

"She's a public lunger or she wouldn't have been singing the
_Benedicite_; and she's a Greenlander or she wouldn't have snow-blinds
over her colloids," said George at last. "She'll be bound for
Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was
an accident ward she'd be hung up at the eight-thousand-foot level.
Yes--consumptives."

"Funny how the new things are the old things. I've read in books," Tim
answered, "that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to the
tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em into
sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've
added to the average life of a man?"

"Thirty years," says George with a twinkle in his eye. "Are we going to
spend 'em all up here, Tim?"

"Flap along, then. Flap along. Who's hindering?" the senior captain
laughed, as we went in.

We held a good lift to clear the coastwise and Continental shipping;
and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one,
there is a steady trickle of traffic this way along. We met Hudson Bay
furriers out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure
from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We
over-crossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who
see no land between Trepassy and Blanco, know what gold they bring back
from West Africa. Trans-Asiatic Directs, we met, soberly ringing the
world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and
white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us,
their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in
the North among the northern sanatoria where you can smell their
grapefruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we
sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed
the