As the Doctor goes about St. Anthony he does not fail to note anything that is new, or to bestow on any worthy achievement a word of praise, for which men and women work the harder.
To “The Master of the Inn” he expressed his satisfaction in the smooth-running, cleanly hostelry. “He is one of my boys,” he remarked to me after the conversation. “He was trained here at St. Anthony, and then at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.”
Then he meets the electrician. “Did you get your ammeter?” he asks. And then: “How did you make your rheostat?”
He points with satisfaction to a little Jersey bull recently acquired, and then he critically surveys the woodland paths that lead from his dooryard to a tea-house on the hill commanding the wide vista of the harbour and the buildings of the industrial colony. “Nothing of this when we came here,” he observes. “The people seem possessed to cut down all their trees: we do our best to save ours, and we dote on these winding walks, which are an innovation.” Then he laughs. “A good woman heard me say that lambs were unknown in Labrador, and that we had to speak of seals instead when we were reading the Scriptures. She sent me a lamb and some birds, stuffed, so that the people might understand. She meant well, but in transit the lamb’s head got sadly twisted on one side, and the birds were decrepit specimens indeed with their bedraggled plumage.”
The house itself is delightful, and it is only too bad that the Doctor and his wife see so little of it.
It is a house with a distinct atmosphere. The soul of it is the living-room with a wide window at the end that opens out upon a prospect of the wild wooded hillside, with an ivy-vine growing across the middle, so that it seems as if there were no glass and one could step right out into the clear, pure air. There is a big, hearty fireplace; there is a generously receptive sofa; there is an upright Steinway piano, where a blind piano-tuner was working at the time of my visit.
Lupins, the purple monk’s hood and the pink fireweed grow along the paths and about the house. A glass-enclosed porch surrounds it on three sides, and in the porch are antlered heads of reindeer and caribou, coloured views of scenery in the British Isles and elsewhere, snowshoes and hunting and fishing paraphernalia, a great hanging pot of lobelias, and—noteworthily—a brass tablet bearing this inscription:
To the Memory of
Three Noble Dogs
Moody