“There was a picturesque soul at Blanc Sablon who asked for tobacco, which we gave him. He was never off the coast. I don’t know where he had heard a violin. But to make some return to us for the smoke, he gave us an imitation of a man first tuning and then playing a violin, which was perfect in its way.” VI THE SPORTSMAN As we were coming off to the _Strathcona_ one evening, the Doctor, bareheaded, pulling at the oars with the zest of a schoolboy on a holiday, and every oar-dip making a running flame of phosphorescence, said: “At college we worshipped at the shrine of athletics. Of course that wasn’t right, but it did establish a standard—it did teach a man that he must keep his body under if he would be physically fit. I realized that if I wanted to win I couldn’t afford to lose an ounce, and so I was a rigid Spartan with myself. The others sometimes laughed at me as a goody-goody, but they saw that I could do things that couldn’t be done by those who indulged in wild flings of dissipation. “My schooling before Oxford I now feel was wretched. They didn’t teach me how to learn. The teachers themselves were mediocre. They may have had a smattering of the classics—but that doesn’t constitute fitness to teach. Have you read the chapter on education in H. G. Well’s ‘Joan and Peter’? That strikes me as true. “I’m glad my orphan children at St. Anthony are getting the right kind of training from those who understand their business.” The Doctor still cherishes the insignia of rowing and athletic clubs to which he was attached while at Oxford. One of his pet coats wears the initials “O. U. R. F. C.” for the Oxford University Rugby Football Club. He also stroked the _Torpid_ crew, and the crew of the London Hospital. He hates—in fact, he refuses, like Peter Pan—to grow up or to grow old. “Isn’t it too bad that just when our minds have struck their stride and are doing their best work we should have to end it all?” Not that he has the least fear of Death. In the country of his loving labour, the fisher-folk face Death so often in their lawful occasions, for the sake of you and me who enjoy the savour of the codfish and the lobster, that when Death finally comes he comes not as a dark and awful figure but as a familiar and a friend. [Illustration: “PLEASE LOOK AT MY TONGUE, DOCTOR!”] [Illustration: “NEXT!”] The conflict of elemental forces in nature finds at once an echo in the breast of him who has met “with a frolic heart” every mood and tense of sky and sea “down north.” At Pleasure Harbour the sunset amid dark purple clouds edged with a rosy fleece brought “vital feelings of delight”: and when we came nearest the Dominion’s northern tip the Doctor said: “I wish you could see the strait ice and the Atlantic ice fight at Cape Bauld. They go at each other hammer and tongs, with a roaring and rending like huge wild animals, rampant and foaming and clashing their tusks.”