ply of condensed milk and extract of beef would soon be
exhausted. Moreover, at Fort Yukon was the trained nurse who had coped
with the epidemic there and at Circle, while we had virtually no
experience with the disease at all. It was resolved to send back to Fort
Yukon for supplies and for the nurse.

The next morning Mr. Knapp and the native boy took the dogs and the sled
and started back. With no load save a little grub and bedding, they
could make the journey in two days, a day must be allowed for
preparations, and, with the aid of another dog team, two days more would
bring them back. Five days was the least they could be gone. It was
asking a great deal of this lady to abandon her Christmas festival,
preparations for which had long been making, and to come sixty-five
miles through the frozen wilderness in a toboggan; but I felt sure she
would drop everything and come.

For those five days I was busied in close attention to the patients and
in strenuous though not altogether availing efforts to maintain a
quarantine of the cabin in which they lay. There was little more that I
could do than swab out the throats and administer food every two hours.
As the disease advanced it was increasingly painful to swallow and
exceedingly difficult to induce the sufferers to make the attempt or to
open their mouths for the swabbing. After two or three days the woman
seemed to have passed the crisis of the disease and to be mending, but
the boy, I thought, grew worse. One becomes attached to those to whom
one ministers, and this poor, speechless boy, with his terrible throat
and the agony in his big black eyes, appealed to me very strongly
indeed. It was torture to move his head or to open his mouth, and I had
to torture him continually.

Every night I gathered the people for Divine service. Here was a little
community far off in the wilds that had carefully conserved and handed
on to their children the teaching they had received no less than thirty
years before. The native Bibles and prayer-books and hymnals were
brought out, bearing dates of publication in the seventies; one of their
number acted as leader, and what he read was painfully followed in the
well-thumbed books. They lifted their voices in a weird transformation
of familiar tunes, with quavers and glides that had crept in through
long, uncorrected use, and amongst the prayers said was one for "Our
Sovereign lady Queen Victoria, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales." I