oney. Many of the crew were hard
characters, and the young skippers were harder still. Often they had
been sent to sea from industrial schools and reformatories.

One awkward boy had cooked the "duff" for dinner and burned it. So the
skipper made him take the ashes from the cook's galley to the
fore-rigging, climb to the cross-tree with the cinders one by one, and
throw them over the cross-tree into the sea, repeating the act till he
had disposed of the contents of the scuttle.

A boy who had not cleaned the cabin as he should was given a
bucketful of sea water, and was made to spend the whole night emptying
it with a teaspoon into another bucket, and then putting it back the
same way.

Most of the boys were lively and merry, and always ready for a lark.

Grenfell, who has never been able to forget that he was once a boy,
got along famously with them, and was hail-fellow-well-met wherever he
went.

Once, when he was aboard a little sailing-vessel, he was playing
cricket on the deck, and the last ball went over the side.

He dived after it at once, telling the helmsman to "tack back." When
the helmsman saw Grenfell struggling in the water, he got so rattled
that it was a long time before he could bring the boat near him.

At last Grenfell managed to catch hold of the end of a rope that was
thrown to him and climb aboard.

But the cricket ball was in his hand!

III

WESTWARD HO! FOR LABRADOR

"In eighteen hundred and ninety-two
Grenfell sailed the ocean blue----"

from Yarmouth to Labrador in a ninety-ton ketch-rigged schooner.

This wasn't such an abrupt change of base as it sounds, for it meant
that the Royal Mission to the Deep Sea Fishermen, which works in the
North Sea, had decided to send a "Superintendent" to the coast of the
North Atlantic, east of Canada and north of Newfoundland, where many
ships each summer went in quest of the cod.

If you will look on the map, you will readily see how Labrador lies in
a long, narrow strip along the coast from the mouth of the St.
Lawrence to Cape Chidley. This strip belongs to the crown colony of
Newfoundland, the big triangular island to the south of the Straits of
Belle Isle, and Newfoundland is entirely independent of the Dominion
of Canada. Fishermen when they go to this region always speak of
going to "the Labrador," and they call it going "down," not "up," when
it is a question of faring north.

The tract that lies along the north sh