watching him from the rail, he suddenly asked:

"Be you a real doctor?"

"That's what I call myself," I replied.

"Us hasn't got no money," he fenced, "but there's a very sick man
ashore, if so be you'd come and see him."

A little later he led me to a tiny sod-covered hovel, compared with
which the Irish cabins were palaces. It had one window of odd
fragments of glass. The floor was of pebbles from the beach; the earth
walls were damp and chilly. There were half a dozen rude wooden bunks
built in tiers around the single room, and a group of some six
neglected children, frightened by our arrival, were huddled together
in one corner. A very sick man was coughing his soul out in the
darkness of a lower bunk, while a pitiably covered woman gave him cold
water to sip out of a spoon. There was no furniture except a small
stove with an iron pipe leading through a hole in the roof.

My heart sank as I thought of the little I could do for the sufferer
in such surroundings. He had pneumonia, a high fever, and was probably
tubercular. The thought of our attractive little hospital on board at
once rose to my mind; but how could one sail away with this husband
and father, probably never to bring him back. Advice, medicine, a few
packages of food were only temporizing. The poor mother could never
nurse him and tend the family. Furthermore, their earning season,
"while the fish were in," was slipping away. To pray for the man, and
with the family, was easy, but scarcely satisfying. A hospital and a
trained nurse was the only chance for this bread-winner--and neither
was available.

I called in a couple of months later as we came South before the
approach of winter. Snow was already on the ground. The man was dead
and buried; there was no provision whatever for the family, who were
destitute, except for the hollow mockery of a widow's grant of twenty
dollars a year. This, moreover, had to be taken up in goods at a truck
store, less debts _if_ she owed any.

Among the nine hundred patients that still show on the records of that
long-ago voyage, some stand out more than others for their peculiar
pathos and their utter helplessness. I shall never forget one poor
Eskimo. In firing a cannon to salute the arrival of the Moravian
Mission ship, the gun exploded prematurely, blowing off both the man's
arms below the elbows. He had been lying on his back for a fortnight,
the pathetic stumps covered only with far from sterile rags dippe