nt
nail-drawer. A moment ago I could not resist the temptation of putting
the _Marseillaise_ on the gramophone, and I went down to find him
with tears rolling down his cheeks as he hummed,

"Allons, enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive."

We've invented a new job for him; he is to "serve" our pipes with
bandages. This means swathing them round and round, and finally adding
an outer covering of newspaper, which has a much-vaunted reputation
for keeping cold out.

Let me tell you the latest epic of the hospital pipes. Those to the
bathroom run through the office. In the last blizzard they burst. The
fire in the fireplace was a conflagration; the steam radiator was
singing a credible song; and as the water trickled down the pipe from
the little fissure, it froze solid before it was three inches on its
way!

A friend sent me for Christmas a charming little poem. One verse runs:

"May nothing evil cross this door,
And may ill fortune never pry
About these Windows; may the roar
And rains go by.

"Strengthened by faith, these rafters will
Withstand the battering of the storm;
This hearth, though all the world grow chill,
Will keep us warm."

I am thinking of hanging the card opposite our pipes as a reminder of
the "way they should go."

_January 15_

The journey to Nameless Cove Fair was all that I had hoped for and a
little more thrown in to make weight. Clear and shining, with
glittering white snow below and sparkling blue sky above, the day
promised fair in spite of a mercury standing at ten below zero, and a
number of komatiks from the Mission started merrily forth. All went
well, and we reached Nameless Cove without adventure, but at sundown
the wind rose. When we left the sale at ten o'clock to return to the
house where I was to spend the night, we had to face the full fury of
a living winter gale. I "caught" both my cheeks on the way, or in
common parlance I froze them. All through that long tug we were
cheered by the thought of a large jug of cream which we had placed on
the stove to thaw when we left the house. Do you fancy that cream had
thawed? Not a bit of it. The fire was doing its best, but old Boreas
was holding our feast prisoner. It had not even begun to disintegrate
around the edges. We cut lumps from the icy mass, dropped them into
our cocoa (which we made by cooking it inside the stove and directly
on top of the coals), hastily