dshed door and into the
others from the outside. You make a dab with a shovel in the direction
where you think you last saw the desired door before the storm, and
trust the fates for results. Part of our roof has blown off and our
chimney is in a tottering condition.

The greatest menace was the telegraph wires. The drifts in places were
so huge that as one walked along, the wires were liable to trip one
up. The doctor has just taken a picture of the dog team being fed from
the third-story window of the hospital. They are clustered on the snow
just outside and on a level with the bottom of the window. Some of the
fishermen in their tiny cottages had to be dug out by kindly
neighbours, as they were completely snowed under!

The storm will greatly delay travelling and it may be almost spring
before this reaches you. It may interest you to know how my letters
come to you in the winter-time, and then perhaps you will not wonder
so much at the delays. The mail is carried across country to Mistaken
Cove, on the west coast, and then by eight relays of couriers with
their dog teams to Deerlake where the railway touches. It is a slow
method of progress, and there are countless delays owing to the
frequent blizzards. Often the mail men fail to make connections, and
the letters may lie a week or a fortnight at some outlandish station.
At one place the postmaster cannot even read, and the letters have to
be marked with crosses at the previous stopping-places, to indicate
the direction of their destination. Another postmaster, well known for
his dishonesty, failed to get removed by the authorities because he
was the only man in the place who could either read or write, and was
therefore indispensable. Formerly all the letters had to go to St.
John's, a day's extra journey, and be sorted there, sent back across
the island to Run-by-Guess, eight hours across Cabot Straits, and then
across the Atlantic to England. In this way a letter might take nearly
three months to make the journey, and we are sometimes that length of
time without news.

Now a "mild" has set in, and the incessant drip, drip, drip on the
balcony roof outside my window makes me perfectly understand how
lunacy and death follow the persistent falling of a single drop on one
spot on the forehead.

_February 11_

Last week I had a three days' "cruise" while the doctor considerately
sent a nurse up here to try her hand at my family. This time the
cruise wa