By the earliest light of morning we were under way. The tendency of a land-lubber at the wheel off this cruel coast was naturally to give the jagged and fearsome spines of rock as wide a berth as possible. In the blue distance might be seen a number of bergs, large and small, just as a reminder of what the ice can do to navigation when it chooses; and in the foreground were fishermen’s skiffs bobbing about and taking their chances of crossing the track of our doughty little steamer. But the Doctor called in at the door of the wheelhouse: “Run her so close to those rocks that you almost skin her!” He was thinking not of his ship, not of himself, but of the necessity of getting to the lonely lighthouse-keeper at the earliest possible moment, to perform that operation for a subtonsillar abscess. There was a picture in his mind of the valiant French Canadian engineer gasping for breath as the orifice dwindled, and now he was burning not the firewood but coal—a semi-precious stone in these waters in this year of grace. The _Strathcona_ labours and staggers; Fritz the dog goes to the bowsprit and sniffs the sun by day and the moon by night; the ship is carrying all the bellying sails she has; and the Doctor mounts to the crow’s-nest to make sure that his beloved new topsail is doing its full share. He tools the _Strathcona_—when he is at the wheel—as if she were a taxicab. So the long diagonal across the Strait is cut down, seething mile by mile, till between Flower’s Cove and Forteau—where the Strait is at the narrowest, and the shores are nine miles and three-quarters apart—it almost seems as if an hour’s swim on either hand would take one to the eternal crags where the iris blows and the buttercup spreads her cloth of gold. We drew near Blanc Sablon (pronounced Sablow) with Grant’s Wharf by the river. West of that river for several hundred yards it is no man’s land between the two Labradors—that is to say, between Canada and Newfoundland. A man stood up in a jouncing power-boat and waved an oar, and then—his overcoat buttoned up to his ears—our patient, Captain Coté, stood up beside him. They had come out to meet us to save every moment of precious time. It was a weak and pale and shaky man that came aboard—but he was a man every bit of him, and he did not wince when the Doctor, in the crypt-like gloom of the _Strathcona’s_ saloon, while the tin lamp was held in front of the Captain’s mouth, reached into the throat with his attenuated tongs and scissors and made the necessary incision after giving him several doses of the novocaine solution as a local anaesthetic. “Then the Captain sat back white and gasping on the settle, and—with a strong Canadian French flavour in his speech—told us a little of his lonely vigil of the summer. “In eighteen days, Doctor, I never saw a ship for the fog: but I kept the light burning—two thousand gallons of kerosene she took.