New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1916, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
To the Reader
In this tale of the seas and ice-floes of Newfoundland and Labrador, Billy Topsail adventures with Doctor Luke of the Labrador. There are thrilling passages in the book. The author is frank to admit the hair-raising quality of them. Indeed, they have tickled his own scalp. Well, it is proper that the hair of the reader should sometimes stand on end and his eyes pop wide. The author would be a poor teller of tales if he could not manage as much—a charlatan if he did not. Yet these thrilling passages are not the work of a saucy imagination, delighting in shudders, no matter what, but are all decently founded upon fact, true to the experience of the coast, as many a Newfoundlander, boy and man, could tell you.
Doctor Luke has often been mistaken for Doctor Wilfred Grenfell of the Deep Sea Mission. That should not be. No incident in this book is a transcript from Doctor Grenfell's long and heroic service. What Billy Topsail and Doctor Luke encounter, however, is precisely what the Deep Sea Mission workers must encounter. It should be said, too, that as the tale is told of the spring of the year, when the ice breaks up and the floes come drifting out of the north with great storms, Newfoundland presents herself in her worst mood. Yet the sun shines in Newfoundland, tender enough in summer weather—there are flowers on the hills and warm winds on the sea; and such as learn to know the land come quickly to love her for her beauty and for her friendliness.
N. D.