It wasn't all plain rowing, by any means. Now and then the boat would get jammed in the ice-pack so that they all must clamber out and lift the stout vessel over the pans. Sometimes men had to stand in the bows and force the pans apart, using their oars after the fashion of crowbars. For a long time as they fought onward very little was said. They were saving their breath for their work. But as they rested on their oars and mopped their brows with their tattered sleeves, Grenfell asked: "How under the sun did you happen to be out in the ice in this boat?" They said that on the night before four men had gone out on a headland to get some harp seals which they had left to freeze there during the winter. As they were starting home, one of them thought he saw an ice-pan with something on it, drifting out to sea. When they got back to the village, and told their neighbors, the latter said it must be just the top of a tree. There was one man in the village who had a good spy-glass. He left his supper instantly, and ran out to the edge of the cliffs. Yes, he said, there was a man out yonder on the ice. He could see him wave his arms--and he declared it must be the Doctor, who had started out that morning. Even though night was falling, and the wind was coming on, they wanted to launch a boat, but it would have been no use: and they decided to wait until morning. The sea was taking up the blocks of ice and hurling them on the beach, just as it used to throw the little fishing-smacks over the sea-wall at Grenfell's boyhood home. Messengers went up and down the coast: look-outs were stationed: many were watching, and some were weeping, all the while that Grenfell thought nobody saw him and that he was waving in vain. Before daybreak, these five volunteers had manned the boat. They took an awful risk in such seething waters. Just a little while before, a fisherman's wife said good-by to her husband and three sons when they started to row out toward a ship that was signaling with flags for a pilot. All four were drowned in spite of their cool and skilful seamanship. The people had come from far and near to see the landing. They rushed into the surf to be the first to shake the Doctor's hands. They seized them and shook them so heartily that he did not find out till later that they had been badly frost-bitten. It was not a pretty object the villagers greeted. Says the Doctor: "I must have been a weird sight as I stepped ashore, tied up in rags, stuffed out with oakum, wrapped in the bloody skins of dogs, with no hat, coat, or gloves besides, and only a pair of short knickers. It must have seemed to some as if it were the old man of the sea coming ashore." [Illustration: WHO SAID "HALT"?] Copious draughts of hot tea, and almost equally liquid Irish stew went to the right spot. Grenfell as a veteran was wise enough not to eat too much all at once. That is the danger, after one has been without food so long.