ou I was called away to interview a young
man from the other side of the harbour. He wanted me to give him some
of the milk used in the Home, for his baby, as at the hospital they
could only furnish him with canned milk, guaranteed by the label, he
claimed, to give "typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever"!

_September 7_

It is a windy, rainy night, and I have told Topsy, who has a cold,
that she cannot come with us to church. After a wild outburst of anger
she was heard to mutter that "Teacher wouldn't let her go to church
because she was afraid she would get too good."

The fall of the year is coming on and the evenings are made wonderful
by two phenomena--the departure of the cannibalistic flies, and the
Northern lights. Twice at home I remember seeing an attenuated aurora
and thinking it wonderful. No words can describe this display on these
crisp and lovely nights. There is a tang and snap in the air, and the
earth beneath and the heavens above seem vibrating with unearthly
life. The Eskimos say that the Northern lights are the spirits of the
dead at play, but I like to think of them, too, as the translated
souls of the icebergs which have gone south and met a too warm and
watery death in the Gulf Stream. Certainly all the colours of those
lovely monarchs of the North are reflected dimly in the heavens. The
lights move about so constantly that one fancies that the soul of the
berg, freed at last from its long prison, is showing the astonished
worlds of what it is capable. The odd thing was that when I first saw
them on a clear night, the stars shone through them, only they looked
like Coleridge's "wan stars which danced between."

I can vouch for the truth of another "sidelight," though from only one
experience. One night last week, clear and frosty, I had just gone to
my room at about eleven o'clock when the doctor called me to come out
and "hear the lights." I thought surely I must have misunderstood, but
on reaching the balcony and listening, I could distinctly hear the
swish of the "spirits" as they rushed across the sky. It sounds like a
diminished silk petticoat which has lost its blatancy, but retains
its personality.

Little did I realize at the time my good fortune in arriving here in
daylight. It seems that it is the invariable habit of all coastal
steamers to reach here at night, and dump the dumbly resenting
passengers in the darkness into the tiny punts which cluster around
the ship's s