wers shouted
out that the good priest had come who had news of God, they dropped
their work and flocked out to meet him. Then he spoke to a floating
congregation, simply as if they were children, and, as with Him
whose message he bore, "the people heard him gladly." They took him
to their sick, and asked him to breathe upon them, which he did to
humor them, until he found out that it was an Angekok practice,
whereupon he refused. Once, after he had spoken of the raising of
Lazarus from the dead, they took him to a new-made grave and asked
him, too, to bring back their dead. They brought him a blind man to
be healed. Egede looked upon them in sorrowful pity. "I can do
nothing," he said; "but if he believes in Jesus, He has the power
and can do it."

"I do believe," shouted the blind man: "let Him heal me." It
occurred to Egede, perhaps as a mere effort at cleanliness, to wash
his eyes in cognac, and he sent him away with words of comfort. He
did not see his patient again for thirteen years. Then he was in a
crowd of Eskimos who came to Godthaab. The man saw as well as Egede.

"Do you remember?" he said, "you washed my eyes with sharp water,
and the Son of God in whom I believed, He made me to see."

Children the Eskimos were in their idolatry, and children they
remained as Christians. By Egede's prayers they set great store.
"You ask for us," they told him. "God does not hear us; He does not
understand Eskimo." Of God they spoke as "Him up there." They
believed that the souls of the dead went up on the rainbow, and,
reaching the moon that night, rested there in the moon's house, on a
bench covered with the white skins of young polar bears. There they
danced and played games, and the northern lights were the young
people playing ball. Afterward they lived in houses on the shore of
a big lake overshadowed by a snow mountain. When the waters ran over
the edge of the lake, it rained on earth. When the "moon was dark,"
it was down on earth catching seal for a living. Thunder was caused
by two old women shaking a dried sealskin between them; the
lightning came when they turned the white side out. The "Big Nail"
we have heard of as the Eskimos' Pole, was a high-pointed mountain
in the Farthest North on which the sky rested and turned around with
the sun, moon, and stars. Up there the stars were much bigger.
Orion's Belt was so near that you had to carry a whip to drive him
away.

The women were slaves. An Eskimo might hav