Illustrating the advantage of getting our freight direct, among the many instances which have occurred, that of the lost searchlight for the Strathcona comes to my mind. As she had often on dark nights to come to anchor among vessels, and to nose her way into unlit harbours, some friends, through the Professor of Geology at Harvard, who had himself cruised all along our coast in a schooner, presented me with a searchlight for the hospital ship and despatched it _via_ Sydney--the normal freight route. Month after month went by, and it never appeared. Year followed year, and still we searched for that searchlight. At length, after two and a half years, it suddenly arrived, having been "delayed on the way." Had it been provisions or clothing or drugs, or almost anything else, of course, it would have been useless. It has proved to us one of the almost _de luxe_ additions to a Mission steamer. * * * * * For a long time I had felt the need of some place in St. John's where work for fishermen could be carried on, and which could be also utilized as a place of safety for girls coming to that city from other parts of the island. My attention was called one day to the fact that liquor was being sent to people in the outports C.O.D., by a barrel of flour which was being lowered over the side of the mail steamer rather too quickly on to the ice. As the hard bump came, the flour in the barrel jingled loudly and leaked rum profusely from the compound fracture. When our sober outport people went to St. John's, as they must every year for supplies, they had only the uncomfortable schooner or the street in which to pass the time. There is no "Foyer des Pecheurs"; no one wanted fishermen straight from a fishing schooner in the home; and in those days there were no Camp Community Clubs. As one man said, "It is easy for the parson to tell us to be good, but it is hard on a wet cold night to be good in the open street" and nowhere to go, and harder still if you have to seek shelter in a brightly lighted room, where music was being played. The boarding-houses for the fishermen, where thousands of our young men flocked in the spring to try for a berth in the seal fishery, were ridiculous, not to say calamitous. Lastly, unsophisticated girls coming from the outports ran terrible risks in the city, having no friends to direct and assist them; and the Institute which we had in mind was to comprise also a girls' lodging department. No provision was made for the accommodation of crews wrecked by accident, and our Institute has already proved invaluable to many in such plights.