I found out later that the trader’s daughters kept the books—in fact, I saw them behind the counter at their father’s store—and they were said to be indifferent and slovenly misses indeed, who used their thumbs for erasures and made as many mistakes in a day’s work as there are blueberries on Blomidon. Perhaps they were in love—but their hit-or-miss accountancy meant a terrible worriment for sea-faring men two hundred miles distant, and a pother of trouble for Dr. Grenfell and a St. John’s lawyer—a friend of the Doctor’s who befriends those who cannot afford or do not know how to obtain legal advice. IX THE MAN OF GOD In his formal addresses Dr. Grenfell exemplifies the homely, pithy eloquence that comes from speaking directly “to men’s business and bosoms” out of the fulness of the heart: but those who have heard him in the little, informal, offhand talks he gives among his own people in his own bailiwick appreciate them even more than what he has to say to a congregation of strangers in a great city far from the Labrador. It must be understood that the quotations that follow are merely extemporaneous, unrevised sentences taken down without the Doctor’s knowledge, and of a nature wholly casual and unpremeditated. At a service held in the tiny saloon of the _Strathcona_ for the crew and the patients who happened to be with us, the Doctor said: “We so often think that religion is bound to be dull and solemn and monotonous: we don’t follow the example of Christ who spread light and joy wherever he went. None of us is perfect, but God doesn’t denounce Dr. Grenfell and Will Sims and Albert Ash (naming members of the crew) for their shortcomings. That isn’t his way. He knows us as we are, with all our weaknesses. He loved David—he said that David was a man after his own heart. Yet David was a bad man—he was an adulterer and incidentally a murderer, and he got his people into trouble that lost thousands of their lives. But God loved him in spite of his human frailties, because he did such a lot of good in the world. “It doesn’t do to take a single text. For instance—we read ‘The world is established so that it cannot be moved,’ but we know that it is all movement: we know that it moves at a pace six times as fast as the fastest aeroplane. But the Church looked at that verse and said that he who denied it was denying the truth. I was reading this morning about Copernicus, who insisted that this world is round. Up to his time men had insisted that it was flat and that you might fall off the edge. Then there was Galileo, who said that it moved: and they put him under the thumbscrews, and when he came out he said, ‘and still it does move.’ [Illustration: DR. GRENFELL LEADING MEETING AT BATTLE HARBOUR.]