Dying mothers held their
suckling babes up to him and died content. In a deserted island camp
a half-grown girl was found alone with three little children. Their
father was dead. When he knew that for him and the baby there was no
help, he went to a cave and, covering himself and the child with
skins, lay down to die. His parting words to his daughter were,
"Before you have eaten the two seals and the fish I have laid away
for you, Pelesse will come, no doubt, and take you home. For he
loves you and will take care of you." At the mission every nook and
cranny was filled with the sick and the dying. Egede and his wife
nursed them day and night. Childlike, when death approached, they
tried to put on their best clothes, or even to have new ones made,
that they might please God by coming into His presence looking fine.
When Egede had closed their eyes, he carried the dead in his arms to
the vestibule, where in the morning the men who dug the graves found
them. At the sight of his suffering the scoffers were dumb. What his
preaching had not done to win them over, his sorrows did. They were
at last one.

That dreadful year left Egede a broken man. In his dark moments he
reproached himself with having brought only misery to those he had
come to help and serve. One thorn which one would think he might
have been spared rankled deep in it all. Some missionaries of a
dissenting sect--Egede was Lutheran--had come with the smallpox ship
to set up an establishment of their own. At their head was a man
full of misdirected zeal and quite devoid of common-sense, who
engaged Egede in a wordy dispute about justification by faith and
condemned him and his work unsparingly. He had grave doubts whether
he was in truth a "converted man." It came to an end when they
themselves fell ill, and Egede and his wife had the last word, after
their own fashion. They nursed the warlike brethren through their
illness with loving ministrations and gave them back to life, let us
hope, wiser and better men.

At Christmas, 1735, Egede's faithful wife, Gertrude, closed her
eyes. She had gone out with him from home and kin to a hard and
heathen land, and she had been his loyal helpmeet in all his trials.
Now it was all over. That winter scurvy laid him upon a bed of pain
and, lying there, his heart turned to the old home. His son had come
from Copenhagen to help, happily yet while his mother lived. To him
he would give over the work. In Denmark he could do