With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
Next in importance after the hospital, Exhibit A is the spick-and-span
orphanage, with thirty-five of the neatest and sweetest children, polite
and friendly and more than willing to learn. The boys who are not named
Peter, James or John are named Wilfred. “Suffer little children to come
unto me” is in big letters on the front of the building. On the hospital
is the inscription: “Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of
these is love.” Over the Industrial School stands written, “Whatsoever
ye do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord.” Here the beautiful rugs are
made—hooked through canvas—according to lively designs of Eskimoes and
seals and polar bears prepared in the main by the Doctor. Even the
bird-house has its legend: “Praise the Lord, ye birds of wing.” There is
a thriving co-operative store, next door to the well-kept little inn. A
sign of the Doctor’s devising and painting swings in front of the store.
On one side is a picture of huskies with a komatik (sled) bringing boxes
to a settler’s door, and the inscription is, “Spot cash is always the
leader.” On the other side of the sign a ship named _Spot Cash_ is seen
bravely ploughing through mountainous waves and towering bergs.
Underneath it reads: “There’s no sinking her.” “That is a reminiscence,”
smiled the Doctor, “of my fights with the traders. Do you think these
signs of mine are cant? I don’t mean them that way. I want every one of
them to count.”
A school, a laundry, a machine-shop and a big store are other features
of the plant at St. Anthony. The dock is a double-decker, and from it a
diminutive tramway with a hand-car sends “feeders” to the various
buildings and even up the walk to the Doctor’s house. All the mail-boats
now turn in at this harbour. The captain of a ship like the
_Prospero_—which in the summer of 1919 brought on four successive trips
70, 70, 60 and 50 patients to overflow the hospital—appreciates the
facilities offered by this modern wharfage.
As the Doctor goes about St. Anthony he does not fail to note anything
that is new, or to bestow on any worthy achievement a word of praise,
for which men and women work the harder.
To “The Master of the Inn” he expressed his satisfaction in the
smooth-running, cleanly hostelry. “He is one of my boys,” he remarked to
me after the conversation. “He was trained here at St. Anthony, and then
at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.”
Then he meets the electrician. “Did you get your ammeter?” he asks. And
then: “How did you make your rheostat?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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