ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for
ever!"

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 for ever."

"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 thing 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 in
sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've
added to the average life of man?"

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

"Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. 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
overcossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who
see no land between Trepassy and Lanco, know what gold they bring back
from West Erica. 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
grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Argentine beef boats we
sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed
the northern health stat