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
He points with satisfaction to a little Jersey bull recently acquired,
and then he critically surveys the woodland paths that lead from his
dooryard to a tea-house on the hill commanding the wide vista of the
harbour and the buildings of the industrial colony. “Nothing of this
when we came here,” he observes. “The people seem possessed to cut down
all their trees: we do our best to save ours, and we dote on these
winding walks, which are an innovation.” Then he laughs. “A good woman
heard me say that lambs were unknown in Labrador, and that we had to
speak of seals instead when we were reading the Scriptures. She sent me
a lamb and some birds, stuffed, so that the people might understand. She
meant well, but in transit the lamb’s head got sadly twisted on one
side, and the birds were decrepit specimens indeed with their bedraggled
plumage.”
The house itself is delightful, and it is only too bad that the Doctor
and his wife see so little of it.
It is a house with a distinct atmosphere. The soul of it is the
living-room with a wide window at the end that opens out upon a prospect
of the wild wooded hillside, with an ivy-vine growing across the middle,
so that it seems as if there were no glass and one could step right out
into the clear, pure air. There is a big, hearty fireplace; there is a
generously receptive sofa; there is an upright Steinway piano, where a
blind piano-tuner was working at the time of my visit.
Lupins, the purple monk’s hood and the pink fireweed grow along the
paths and about the house. A glass-enclosed porch surrounds it on three
sides, and in the porch are antlered heads of reindeer and caribou,
coloured views of scenery in the British Isles and elsewhere, snowshoes
and hunting and fishing paraphernalia, a great hanging pot of lobelias,
and—noteworthily—a brass tablet bearing this inscription:
To the Memory of
Three Noble Dogs
Moody
Watch
Spy
whose lives were given for
mine on the ice
April 21, 1908
Wilfred Grenfell
St. Anthony
It is the kind of house that eloquently speaks of being lived in.
It is comfortable, but the note of idle luxury or useless ostentation is
absent. There is no display for its own sake. The books bear signs of
being fireside companions. Dr. Grenfell is fond of running a pencil down
the margin as he reads. He is very fond of the books of his intimate
friend Sir Frederick Treves, in whose London hospital he was
house-surgeon. “The Land that is Desolate” was aboard the _Strathcona_.
Millais’ book on Newfoundland was on the writing desk at St. Anthony,
and had been much scored, as, indeed, had many of his other books.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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