selected for a hospital, the family that occupied it bundled
out into a tent, and the two sick persons carefully moved into it, with
whom and the mother of the sick boy the nurse took up her abode. Then
there was the Christmas-tree in the chief's cabin, with little gifts for
the children sent out from the mission at Fort Yukon some time before,
and a dance afterward, for Christmas festivities must go on, whatever
happens, at a native village. I took James's pocket-knife to him after
the celebration was over, and I think he really tried to smile as he
thanked me with his eyes.

The next day after the services, although it was Christmas Day, we set
to work on the disinfecting of the large cabin in which the sick had
lain. Stringing bedclothes and wearing apparel on lines from wall to
wall, and stuffing up every crack and cranny with cotton, we burned
quantities of sulphur, that the nurse had brought with her, all day
long.

A recent article in a stray number of a professional journal picked up
in the office of a medical missionary, devoted column after column to
the uselessness of all known methods of disinfection. Sulphur,
formaldehyde, carbolic acid, permanganate of potash, chloride of lime,
bichloride of mercury--the author knew not which of these "fetiches" to
be most sarcastic about. It may be that the net result of our copious
fumigation was but the bleaching of the coloured garments hung up, but
at least it did no harm. One sometimes wishes that these scientists who
sit up so high in the seat of the scornful would condescend to a little
plain instruction.

The anti-diphtheritic serum is now kept in readiness at all our
missions in Alaska, and the disease seems to have ceased its
depredations; but it has taken terrible toll of the native people.

[Sidenote: THE MISSIONARY NURSE]

We wished to stay with the nurse until the sickness should be done, but
she would not hear of it, and insisted upon the resumption of our
journey. It did not seem right to go off and leave this lonely woman,
sixty-five miles from the nearest white person, to cope with an outbreak
of disease that might not yet have spent itself, although there had been
no new case for a week. "You've done your work here, now leave me to do
mine. You'll not get to Point Hope this winter if you stay much longer."

"Aren't you afraid to stay all by yourself?" I asked, somewhat
fatuously.

"Afraid? Afraid of what? You surely don't mean afraid of the nati