An industry of growing importance to the future of the Grenfell mission is the manufacture and sale of “hooked” rugs by the women trained at the industrial school at St. Anthony. Large department stores in the United States have begun to buy these rugs in considerable quantities, and the demand is lively and increasing. The Doctor’s delightful sense of humour comes to the fore in his designs for these rugs, made of rags worked through canvas. The dyes are vivid green, blue, red, black, brown—the white rivals the driven snow, and the workmanship is of the best. A favourite pattern shows the dogs harnessed to the komatik eager to be off, turning in the traces as if to ask questions of the driver, their attitude alert and alive, while their two masters standing by the baggage on the komatik, in hoods and heavy parkas (blouses) rimmed with red and blue, are discussing the route to take and pointing with their mittened hands. Or the design may show Eskimoes stealthily stalking polar bears upon an ice-pan of a wondrous green at the edges. There is a glorious Turnerian sunset in the background; the sea bristles with bergs arched and pinnacled. The wary hunters approach their hapless quarry in a kyak. One is paddling and the other has the rifle across his knees, and the polar bears are nervously pacing the ice-pan as though conscious of the fate impending. Another motif in these diverting rugs—which are often used for wall adornments instead of floor-covering—is a stately procession of three bears uphill past the solemn green sentinels of pagoda-like fir trees. What an improvement these designs are over the former rugs which showed meaningless blotches of pink and green that might have been thrown at one another, as if a mason’s trowel had splashed them there! Since the Labrador is innocent in most places of anything like a store where you can go to the counter, lay down your money and ask for what you want, the nearest thing the women know to the luxury of a shopping-expedition or a bargain-sale is a chance to exchange firewood or fish for the old clothing carried on her missionary journeys by the _Strathcona_. “Why isn’t this clothing given away?” someone may query unthinkingly. The object of the mission is not to pauperize, and the pride of the people themselves in most cases forbids the acceptance of an outright gift. To preserve self-respect by the exchange of a _quid pro quo_, some of the clothing contributed by friends in the States and elsewhere is allocated to the fishermen’s families in return for the supplies of firewood. The value varies according to the place where the wood is cut and piled. It may be worth $7 a cord on a certain point or $3 at the bottom of a bay. (Cutting the wood is called “cleaving the splits.”) The payment must be very carefully apportioned, so that Mrs. B. shall not have more or better than Mrs. A.—or else there will be wailing and gnashing and heart-burning after the boat weighs anchor.