As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more,
Now, than flesh helps soul!”
Browning.
WHEN people meet Dr. Grenfell, the good doctor who braves the storms of the most dangerous of all sea-coasts and endures the hardships of arctic winters to care for the lonely fisherfolk of Labrador, they often ask, with pitying wonder:
“How do you manage it, Doctor, day in and day out through all the long months? It seems too much for any man to sacrifice himself as you do.”
“Don’t think for a moment that I’m a martyr,” replies Dr. Grenfell, a bit impatiently, “Why, I have a jolly good time of it! There’s nothing like a really good scrimmage to make a fellow sure that he’s alive, and glad of it. I learned that in my football days, and Labrador gives even better chances to know the joy of winning out in a tingling good tussle.”
Dr. Grenfell’s face, with the warm color glowing through the tan, his clear, steady eyes, and erect, vigorous form, all testify to his keen zest in the adventure of life. Ever since he could remember, he had, he told us, been in love with the thrill of strenuous action. When a small boy, he looked at the tiger-skin and other trophies of the hunt which his soldier uncles had sent from India, and dreamed of the time when he should learn the ways of the jungle at first hand.
He comes of a race of strong men. One uncle was a general who bore himself with distinguished gallantry in the Indian Mutiny at Lucknow when the little garrison of seventeen hundred men held the city for twelve weeks against a besieging force ten times as great. One of his father’s ancestors was Sir Richard Grenville, the hero of the Revenge, who, desperately struggling to save his wounded men, fought with his one ship against the whole Spanish fleet of fifty-three. Perhaps you remember Tennyson’s thrilling lines:
And the stately Spanish men to their flag-ship bore him then,
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;