gardens, and your attachment to angle-worms--which
you will recall I do not share--you would be interested in our efforts
along these lines--the gardens, not the worms. In this climate a
garden is a lottery, and in ten seasons to one a spiteful summer
frost will fall upon the promising potatoes and kill the lot just as
they are ripening. The Eskimos at the Moravian stations put their
vegetal charges to bed each night with long covers over the rows. The
other day, in an old journal about the country, I came upon this
passage, and it struck me "How history does repeat itself." It runs:
"The soyle along the coast is not deep of earth, but bringing forth
abundantly peason small, peason which our countrymen have sowen have
come up faire, of which our Generall had a present acceptable for the
rarenesse, being the first fruits coming up by art and industrie in
that desolate and dishabited land." I can assure you that the sight of
a "peason," however small, if it did not come out of a tin can, would
be an acceptable offering to your friend. Even in summer we get no
fresh vegetables or fruits with the exception of occasional lettuce or
local berries. The epitome of this spot is a tin! In the same old
journal Whitbourne goes on to say that "Nature had recompensed that
only defect and incommoditie of some sharpe cold by many
benefits--with incredible quantitie and no less varietie of kindes of
fish in the sea and fresh water, of trouts and salmons and other fish
to us unknowen."

I have eaten fish (interspersed liberally with tinned stuff) and
drunken fish and thought and spoken and dreamt fish ever since I
arrived. But don't pity me for imaginary hardships. I like fish better
than I do meat, and for that matter our winter meat supply is walking
past my window this minute. He goes by the name of "Billy the Ox"; and
I am informed that as soon as it begins to freeze, he is to be killed
and frozen _in toto_, for the winter consumption of the staff,
patients, and children. So our winter is not to consist of one long
Friday.

_August 28_

You already know the worst about my leanings to Papacy; but to-day I
propose to set your mind at rest on an idea with which you have
hypnotized yourself--namely, that I am going to die of malnutrition
during what you are pleased to term the "long Arctic winter." I have
no intention of starving, and as for the "long Arctic winter," I do
not believe there is any such beast, as the farmer s