the
land.

_The Southern Cross_ in 1914 was coming from the banks with 174 men
and a full load. She was lost with all hands, and her fate remains a
mystery. A life-belt picked up on the Irish coast was all that was
ever recovered from the doomed ship. In the same year the men of the
_Newfoundland_ were caught out on the ice and unable to get back to
the ship. Of the company seventy-seven lost their lives and forty-two
were crippled.

Two boys and two men were tending seal nets when a "divey" or
snowstorm blew them helplessly to sea. They crashed on an island, but
ere they could land they were blown off again. During the night and
the morning that followed, both men and one of the boys died. The
other boy dressed himself in the clothes of the three who died, and
kept their bodies in the boat.

They had caught an old harp seal, and he ate its flesh and drank its
blood. On the third day he gaffed another seal as it floated past on a
cake of ice. Then he had another drink of warm blood. Two days later
he killed another seal.

By that time he began "seeing things." He thought he saw a ship in the
distance. He clambered out of his boat and hobbled five miles over the
ice, only to find that it was not a sail that he had seen, but a
hummock of ice. The only thing to do was to make his way back over the
weary miles to the boat he left.

On the seventh day, with despair gnawing at his heart, one of the
sealing fleet, the _Flora_, came in sight.

It was dark, and this was his one chance of rescue. He shouted with
all his might. But the boat immediately backed as if to leave him.

He screamed again, and the merciful wind caught up his voice and
carried it to the vessel.

He shouted once more: "For God's sake, don't leave me with my dead
father here!"

Then the ship hove to, and when the brave boy was lifted aboard the
watch explained to him:

"Ye see, lad, the first time we heard ye call we thought it was
sperrits."

They picked up the boat as well as the boy, and finally put them
aboard another vessel that was going toward the lad's fatherless home.

Grenfell went out with the sealing fleet and took his full share of
all the hardships of the mariners who from boyhood look on sealing as
life's great adventure. While they are still tiny tads, the boys of
St. John's and the outposts practise leaping across rain-barrels and
mud-puddles. They are looking forward to the time when a running jump
from one cake of ice to