Fullerton L. Waldo

“ Captain Coté said the winter ice-pack tossed these great stones about as if it were a child’s game with marbles.
A happy man he thought himself to have his children with him. The lighthouse-keeper at Belle Isle lost six of his family on their way to join him; another at Flower’s Cove lost five. As a remorseless graveyard of the deep the region is a rival of the dreaded Sable Island off Newfoundland’s south shore. ”

“ It was four miles, he knew, to a rocky headland over yonder, if he ventured out on that uncertain field of ice. That would save several miles over the more prudent course alongshore.
As far as he could see, the ice looked as though it would hold up the sled. It was rough—but a hardened voyager with a dog-team is accustomed to a hummocky road. It looked as if the sea had torn it up, as men tear up the paving blocks in a city street, and then thrown the bits together to make a hard, cohesive mass that men and dogs could surely trust. ”

“ The tendency of a land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to those rocks that you almost skin her!” ”

“ A bad tenant is not turned into a good one merely by a periodic demand for money. If all tenants were always in comfortable circumstances, if they never suffered from lack of employment, if protracted illness disabling the bread-winner of the family never spelt acute privation for the rest, if every poor and ignorant foreigner understood from the first his relation to the community and to society at large, and scrupulously maintained this relation for his part, the “friendly rent-collector” might be superfluous. ”

“ Eskimo taken to the World's Fair in Chicago were homesick for the smell of decaying blubber, rancid whale-meat, steaming bodies in the igloo, the rich perfume of the dogs, and all the other aromatic comforts of home. As smells are their special delight, so dirt is their peculiar glory. A bath in warm water would make them as unhappy as it makes a cat.
Fond of eating as they are, they like a change of food, and if bear-meat is all they find to eat in a certain spot, they hitch up and hike on to a better meal at a distance. They always want to be on the go. ”

“ Anyone who sees even a little of Grenfell in action must realize how faithful his life is to the pattern of Christ’s life on earth. There are many passages of Christ’s experience—as when the crowd pressed in upon Him—or when learned men were supercilious—or when He perceived that virtue had gone out of Him—or when He was reproached because He let a man die in His absence—that remind one of Grenfell’s thronged and hustled life. Many believe that Grenfell can all but work a miracle of healing ”

“ The friendly rent-collector bides her time, keeps her tongue behind her teeth, and makes allowances for the previous condition of servitude to low ideals and to grasping landlords, which has been that of many of her charges.
The real reward of the work to the right sort of worker is in this lively, daily chance to meet the people and to help them in their problems by the service that is better than the outright gift of money. ”

“ In the wheelhouse as he looks out over the sea and guides the prow, as if it were a sculptor’s chisel, through calm or storm, there comes into his eyes a look as of communing with a far country: his soul has gone to a secret, distant coast where no man and but one woman can follow.
Sometimes of an evening the Doctor brought out the chessboard and I saw another phase of his versatile entity—his fondness for an indoor game that is of science and not blind chance. ”

“ It had taken six hours to do ten miles. The sea was throwing the ice about with a mighty booming and crashing like the firing of cannon. The blizzard stung their faces and lashed their bodies. Grenfell was ready to dare the passage. But the men who came for him would not have it so. His life was precious in their sight: and they knew what its preservation meant to all that helpless lonesomeness of the winter coast.
It lacked six hours to daylight. If they waited, the dogs would not freeze, but men might suffer, and perhaps lose their lives. ”

“ There are so many children shrieking and sprawling over the cobbles already that it doesn’t seem as though there could be any left in any of the houses. But there are always plenty more. Here are some, too tiny to be allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of summer they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird’s nest. ”

“ The small amount of ready money on which people can live with a house, a vegetable garden, and a supply of firewood at their backs in the timbered hillsides is unbelievable. If a man was fortunate enough to possess any grassland, he might get as much as $65 a ton for his hay in 1919, if he could spare it from his own cows and sheep. It is too bad that for the sake of the sheep the noble Newfoundland dog that chased them has had to perish. It is almost impossible today to find a pure-breed example of the dog that spread the name of the island to the ends of the earth. ”

“ Sometimes to avoid an awful drubbing the Neptune would steam a little ahead, very much as a swimmer dives into a breaker to cleave it before it combs over and carries him off his feet. Grenfell himself, loving a bout with "the bright eyes of danger," left the ship and went out on the ice and tried to climb one of the bergs, stranded in the midst of the ice-pack. It was like a living thing striving to fight its way out—something like a polar bear surrounded by "husky" dogs worrying him and trying to pull him down. ”

“ If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a benefactor, then what is he who tears down a ramshackle tenement and rears in its place such a house as the Casa Ravello, where many families enjoy the privileges of privacy and individuality, or a group of houses such as those in the Richmond district, where the children have abundant play room and each occupant controls half his house, or a small home for one family of which so many examples are entered on the books of the Association in various localities and at varying prices, all within a modest range? ”

“ You who have sampled the salt breezes of the North on board my boat, have, I know, imbibed the spirit that actuates the belief that in a world like ours we can all be knights. I know that like ourselves, you look upon the world as a field of honor, and its only durable prizes the things that we can accomplish in it. You see the fun in it all—the real joie de vivre. ”

“ To him, forever, a man’s own soul is a matter more important than an ordinance, and he spares no pains to make his meaning so plain that the dullest apprehension cannot fail to grasp it. You will see Grenfell at his best when—in a whipping wind, bareheaded, sweatered, rubber-booted—he stands in the clear glitter of a bracing sunny day on the beach with the dogs aprowl around him, painstakingly explaining to a fisherman why it is right to do thus and reprehensible to do otherwise. ”

“ The slender hope of being seen from the shore diminished as Grenfell thought of how inconspicuous he was, nearly naked, his dogs about him. Crusoe alone on his isle of solid ground was a king of space by comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man adrift on the offshore ice had come ashore to tell the tale. Nearly anybody gazing seaward—even if anybody saw—would say: "Oh, that's just a piece of kelp or a bush!" The wiseacres refuse to be fooled by such sights. They are like the Arabs of the desert, who refuse to get excited over a mirage. ”

“ No record of a transaction in the business of the Association depends upon haphazard recollection or mere say-so. The office-hours are conducted without fuss or flurry, the floors are spotless, the desks are cleared for action. Waste motion is eliminated, the virtues of thrift and of system are illustrated, and still there is heart and human feeling in the enterprise. It is not possible to visit the headquarters without realizing at once the atmosphere of sincerity and diligence and practical success that surrounds the work. It is philanthropy ”

“ The dogs at Battle Harbour live up to the name of the settlement. Like all other “huskies,” they are ready to fight on slight provocation, and the night is made vocal with their long-drawn ululations. Their appetite is insatiable—they devour with enthusiasm whatsoever things are thrown out at the kitchen door—they even ate a towel that went astray—and when nothing better offers they will wade into the water in quest of caplin, or cods’ heads. In their enthusiasm for food the dogs will dig through boards to get at cattle and pigs, and cows and chickens seldom live where the dogs are numerous. ”

“ In a dark angle of a yard, behind a woodshed cluttered and foul, there is a pool of stinking black water out of which you can fish rotten burlap and odds and ends of the social history of all the houses. The curious children have turned pale green, like sprouts in a cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. ”

“ You may think that the dog Fritz out on the bowsprit is enjoying all the morning there is, but the Doctor is transformed.
“I love these early mornings,” he says—and he is innocent of pose when he says it: it is not a mere literary emotion. “It’s a beautiful sight in autumn with the ice when the banks are red with the little hills clear-cut against the sky and the sea a deep, deep blue. Isn’t it a beautiful world to live in? Isn’t it fun to live?”
You have to admit that it is.
“A man can’t think just of stomachs all the time. Sometimes I have to go away for a day or two. ”

“ It is the nearest thing the Eskimos have to motion pictures—and what a motion picture the whole of the seal-hunt is! No wonder the hunter lolls back like a lord, and lets himself be waited on, a conquering hero.
The old men feel their youth renewed as they sit and listen to these wonder-tales. In their turn, they are moved to tell how they met the walrus in fair fight and overcame him. Perhaps the dreaded tusk went right through the side of the boat and wounded the hunter. But there are no friends like Eskimo friends for a man in such a plight. ”