Drusilla, aged five, has been to my door to enquire if the children may play with their dolls in the house. I believe in open-air treatment, so I replied with kindness, but firmly withal, that "out of doors" was the order of the day. I was a little electrified to hear her return to the playroom and announce that "Teacher says you are to go out, every darned one of you!" I was equally electrified the other day to overhear Drusilla enquiring of her fellow philosophers which they liked the best, "Teacher, the Doctor, or the Lord Jesus Christ."
In the midst of writing to you I was called away to interview a young man from the other side of the harbour. He wanted me to give him some of the milk used in the Home, for his baby, as at the hospital they could only furnish him with canned milk, guaranteed by the label, he claimed, to give "typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever"!
September 7
It is a windy, rainy night, and I have told Topsy, who has a cold, that she cannot come with us to church. After a wild outburst of anger she was heard to mutter that "Teacher wouldn't let her go to church because she was afraid she would get too good."
The fall of the year is coming on and the evenings are made wonderful by two phenomena—the departure of the cannibalistic flies, and the Northern lights. Twice at home I remember seeing an attenuated aurora and thinking it wonderful. No words can describe this display on these crisp and lovely nights. There is a tang and snap in the air, and the earth beneath and the heavens above seem vibrating with unearthly life. The Eskimos say that the Northern lights are the spirits of the dead at play, but I like to think of them, too, as the translated souls of the icebergs which have gone south and met a too warm and watery death in the Gulf Stream. Certainly all the colours of those lovely monarchs of the North are reflected dimly in the heavens. The lights move about so constantly that one fancies that the soul of the berg, freed at last from its long prison, is showing the astonished worlds of what it is capable. The odd thing was that when I first saw them on a clear night, the stars shone through them, only they looked like Coleridge's "wan stars which danced between."
I can vouch for the truth of another "sidelight," though from only one experience. One night last week, clear and frosty, I had just gone to my room at about eleven o'clock when the doctor called me to come out and "hear the lights." I thought surely I must have misunderstood, but on reaching the balcony and listening, I could distinctly hear the swish of the "spirits" as they rushed across the sky. It sounds like a diminished silk petticoat which has lost its blatancy, but retains its personality.
Little did I realize at the time my good fortune in arriving here in daylight. It seems that it is the invariable habit of all coastal steamers to reach here at night, and dump the dumbly resenting passengers in the darkness into the tiny punts which cluster around the ship's side. Since my arrival every single boat has appeared shortly before midnight, or shortly after. In either case it means that the men of the Mission must work all night landing patients and freight, and the next day there is a chastened and sleepy community to meet the forthcoming tasks. It is especially hard on the hospital folk, for the steamer only takes about twenty hours to go to the end of her run and return, and they try and send those cases which do not have to be admitted back by the same boat on her southern journey. This means an all-night clinic. But I can say to the credit of the patients and staff that I have never heard one word of complaint. That is certainly a charming feature about this life. There are plenty of things to growl about, but one is so reduced to essentials that the ones selected are of more importance than those which afford such fruitful topics in civilization.
I have just overheard Gabriel informing the other children that "Satan was once an angel, but he got real saucy, so God turned him out of heaven." Paradise Lost in a sentence!
The night after the audible lights a furious rain and wind storm broke over us. No wonder the trees have such a struggle for existence, if these storms are frequent. They do not last long, but they are the real thing while they are in progress. I used to smile when I was told that the Home was riveted with iron bolts to the solid bedrock, but that night when I lay wide awake, combating an incipient feeling of mal de mer as my bed rocked with the force of the gale, I thanked the fates for the foresight of the builders. Never before had I believed in the tale of the church having been blown bodily into the harbour; but during those wild hours of darkness I was certain at each succeeding gust that we were going to follow its example.
Dawn—a pale affair looking out suspiciously on the chastened world—broke at last, and I "histed" my window (to quote the estimable 'Senath). The rain had stopped. The cheated wind was whistling around the corners of the old wooden buildings, and taking out its spite on any passers-by who must venture forth to work. The harbour, usually so peaceful and so sheltered, was lashed into a cauldron of boiling white foam, and the rocks were swept so clean that they at least had "shining morning faces."