During the past years it has been the experience of many of my colleagues, as well as myself, that as soon as one mentions the fact that part of our work is done on the north shore of Newfoundland, one's audience loses interest, and there arises the question: "But Newfoundland is a prosperous island. Why is it necessary to carry on a charitable enterprise there?" There is a sharp demarcation between main or southern Newfoundland and the long finger of land jutting northward, which at Cape Bauld splits the polar current, so that the shores of the narrow peninsula are continuously bathed in icy waters. The country is swept by biting winds, and often for weeks enveloped in a chilly and dripping blanket of fog. The climate at the north end of the northward-pointing finger is more severe than on the Labrador side of the Straits. Indeed, my friend, Mr. George Ford, for twenty-seven years factor of the Hudson Bay Company at Nakvak, told me that even in the extreme north of Labrador he never really knew what cold was until he underwent the penetrating experience of a winter at St. Anthony. The Lapp reindeer herders whom we brought over from Lapland, a country lying well north of the Arctic Circle, after spending a winter near St. Anthony, told me that they had never felt anything like that kind of cold, and that they really could not put up with it! The climate of the actual Labrador is clear, cold, and still, with a greater proportion of sunshine than the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. As a matter of fact, our station at St. Anthony is farther north and farther east than two of our hospitals on the Labrador side of the Straits of Belle Isle. Along that north side the gardens of the people are so good that their produce affords a valuable addition to the diet--but not so here. [Illustration: BATTLE HARBOUR] The dominant industry of the whole Colony is its fisheries--the ever-recurrent pursuit of the luckless cod, salmon, herring, halibut, and lobster in summer, and the seal fishery in the month of March. It is increasingly difficult to overestimate the importance, not merely to the British Empire, but to the entire world, of the invaluable food-supply procured by the hardy fishermen of these northern waters. Only the other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain's oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to work primarily, the floating population which every summer, some twenty thousand strong, visits the coasts of Labrador; and later including the white resident settlers of the Labrador and North Newfoundland coasts as well.