miuk's mother. Her name is
Regina, and she is now married to Valentine, the king of the Eskimos
there. I have an excellent photograph of a royal dinner party, a thing
which I never possessed before. The king and queen and a solitary
courtier are seated on the rocks, gnawing contentedly raw walrus
bones--"ivik" they call it.

The Eskimos one year suffered very heavily from an epidemic of
influenza--the germ doubtless imported by some schooner from the
South. Like all primitive peoples, they had no immunity to the
disease, and the suffering and mortality were very high. It was a
pathetic sight as the lighter received its load of rude coffins from
the wharf, with all the kindly little people gathered to tow them to
their last resting-place in the shallow sand at the end of the inlet.
The ten coffins in one grave seemed more the sequence of a battle
than of a summer sickness in Labrador. Certainly the hospital move on
the part of the Moravians deserved every commendation; though I
understand that at their little hospital in Okkak they have not always
been able to have a qualified medical man in residence.

One old man, a patient on whose hip I had operated, came and insisted
that I should examine the scars. Oddly enough during the operation the
Eskimo, who was the only available person whom I had been able to find
to hold the light, had fainted, and left me in darkness. I had
previously had no idea that their sensibilities were so akin to ours.

At Napatuliarasok Island are some lovely specimens of blue and green and
golden Labradorite, a striated feldspar with a glorious sheen. Nothing
has ever really been done with this from a commercial point of view;
moreover, the samples of gold-bearing quartz, of which such good hopes
have been entertained, have so far been found wanting also. In my
opinion this is merely due to lack of persevering investigation--for one
cannot believe that this vast area of land can be utterly unremunerative.

On one of the old maps of Labrador this terse description is written
by the cartographer: "Labrador was discovered by the English. There is
nothing in it of any value"; and another historian enlarges on the
theme in this fashion: "God made the world in five days, made Labrador
on the sixth, and spent the seventh throwing stones at it." It is so
near and yet so far, so large a section of the British Empire and yet
so little known, and so romantic for its wild grandeur, and many
fastnesses st