The wind can go whooping around that house all it likes and it never will get in unless it is invited. That house was nailed and shingled, doored and windowed, to stand up against the stiffest blast that ever came howling across the rocks and bergs from the Humboldt Glacier or even the North Pole.
Part of the time a blind piano-tuner was at work groping for lost chords among the strings of Mrs. Grenfell's piano. The piano didn't seem to need tuning so much. But the man needed the work. You can imagine there is not much for a blind piano-tuner to do in Newfoundland. Most of the music is the canned variety of the Victrola. Or, if there is a dance, someone may squat obligingly in a corner and hum very loudly what is called by its true name—"chin-music."
Mrs. Grenfell, happy to have her husband back from the gales and fogs for a little while, was sitting in the puffy armchair with her knitting-needles, and the boys, Pascoe and Wilfred, were up-stairs with their teacher, making out jig-saw puzzles in arithmetic or knocking the tar out of the French Grammar, with various loud sounds.
What the telephone is to busy men in America, giving them no peace even in the bathtub, the telegraph is to the Doctor in Newfoundland. If it isn't a man on the doorstep with a bleeding cut or a hacking cough, then it is a boy with a message which comes from a point twenty to sixty miles off. Most of the time your doctor or mine has a few blocks to go: and we think it hard, and he thinks so too, if a patient clamors for him in the middle of the night. But the middle of the night is the heart of Grenfell's office hours. Once after conducting a late evening service in the church at Battle Harbor he had to doctor forty patients in the room off the chancel before he could get away.
So it was no surprise to him, in the midst of a tale of the old days at Oxford on the football-field, to have a rat-tat like Poe's raven at the door, and a respectful "young visitor" doffing his sou'wester.
"Please, sir, a telegram."
Grenfell tore it open.
It read: "Doctor would you please come. My throat is full up and I can't eat or sleep."
It was signed "J.N. Coté."
"That," said Grenfell, "is the lighthouse-keeper at Greenley Island, just west of the line that divides Canadian Labrador from Newfoundland Labrador. He has a big job on his hands. He has two fog-horns, each with a twelve horse-power Fairbanks gasoline engine, so that if one's put out of business he can use the other. He's had fog all summer—and a sub-tonsillar abscess, too. The big Canadian Pacific ships go by his place. It's a bad spot. The light-keeper at Forteau tried to bring out his wife and five children—and lost all but one child on the rocks. Another keeper at Belle Isle tried to bring out a family of about the same size—and they all were lost. A doctor stopped in on Captain Coté on the down trip from Battle Harbor, on his way back to Baltimore. Evidently whatever he did wasn't enough. Looks as if I must go and finish the job."