The Eskimos were only too glad to be rid of the responsibility of the sick lad, and, furthermore, he was "no good fishing." So the next day saw us steaming south again, carrying with us the boy and his one treasured possession—a letter from a clergyman at Andover, Massachusetts. It contained a photograph, and when I showed it to Pomiuk he said, "Me even love him."
A letter was sent to the address given, and some weeks later came back an answer. "Keep him," it said. "He must never know cold and loneliness again. I write for a certain magazine, and the children in 'The Corner' will become his guardians." Thus the "Corner Cot" was founded, and occupied by the little Eskimo Prince for the brief remainder of his life.
On my return the following summer the child's joyful laughter greeted me as he said, "Me Gabriel Pomiuk now." A good Moravian Brother had come along during the winter and christened the child by the name of the angel of comfort.
In a sheltered corner of a little graveyard on the Labrador coast rests the tiny body of this true prince. When he died the doctor in charge of the hospital wrote me that the building seemed desolate without his smiling, happy face and unselfish presence. The night that he was buried the mysterious aurora lit up the vault of heaven. The Innuits, children of the Northland, call it "the spirits of the dead at play." But it seemed to us a shining symbol of the joy in the City of the King that another young soldier had won his way home.
The Roman Catholic Church is undoubtedly correct in stating that the first seven years of his life makes the child. Missions have always emphasized the importance of the children from a purely propaganda point of view. But our Children's Home was not begun for any such reason. Like Topsy, "it just grow'd." I had been summoned to a lonely headland, fifty miles from our hospital at Indian Harbour, to see a very sick family. Among the spruce trees in a small hut lived a Scotch salmon fisher, his wife and five little children. When we anchored off the promontory we were surprised to receive no signs of welcome. When we landed and entered the house we found the mother dead on the bed and the father lying on the floor dying. Next morning we improvised two coffins, contributed from the wardrobes of all hands enough black material for a "seemly" funeral, and later, steaming up the bay to a sandy stretch of land, buried the two parents with all the ceremonies of the Church—and found ourselves left with five little mortals in black sitting on the grave mound. We thought that we had done all that could be expected of a doctor, but we now found the difference. It looked as if God expected more. An uncle volunteered to assume one little boy and we sailed away with the remainder of the children. Having no place to keep them, we wrote to a friendly newspaper in New England and advertised for foster parents. One person responded. A young farmer's wife wrote: "I am just married to a farmer in the country, and miss the chance to teach children in Sunday-School, or even to get to church, it is so far away. I think that I can feed two children for the Lord's sake. If you will send them along, I will see that they do not want for anything." We shipped two, and began what developed into our Children's Home with the balance of the stock.
We had everything to learn in the rearing of children, having had only the hygienic side of their development to attend to previously. One of the two which we kept turned out very well, becoming a fully trained nurse. The other failed. Both of those who went to New England did well, the superior discipline of their foster mother being no doubt responsible. The following fall I made a special journey to see the latter. It was a small farm on which they lived, and a little baby had just arrived. Only high ideals could have persuaded the woman to accept the added responsibility. The children were as bright and jolly as possible.
Among the other functions which have fallen to my lot to perform is the ungrateful task of unpaid magistrate, or justice of the peace. In this capacity a little later I was called on to try a mother, who in a Labrador village had become a widow and later married a man with six children who refused to accept her three-year-old little girl. When I happened along, the baby was living alone in the mother's old shack, a mud-walled hut, and she or the neighbours went in and tended it as they could. None of the few neighbours wanted permanently to assume the added expense of the child, so dared not accept it temporarily. It was sitting happily on the floor playing with a broken saucer when I came in. It showed no fear of a stranger; indeed, it made most friendly overtures. I had no right to send the new husband to jail. I could not fine him, for he had no money. There was no jail in Labrador, anyhow. My special constable was a very stout fisherman, a family man, who proposed to nurse the child till I could get it to some place where it could be properly looked after. When we steamed away, we had the baby lashed into a swing cot. It became very rough, and the baby, of course, crawled out and was found in the scuppers. It did everything that it ought not to do, but which we knew that it would. But we got it to the hospital at last and the nurse received it right to her heart.
In various ways my family grew at an alarming rate, once the general principle was established. On my early summer voyage to the east coast of Labrador I found at Indian Harbour Hospital a little girl of four. In the absence of her father, who was hunting, and while her mother lay sick in bed, she had crawled out of the house and when found in the snow had both legs badly frozen. They became gangrenous halfway to the knee, and her father had been obliged to chop them both off. An operation gave her good stumps; but what use was she in Labrador with no legs? So she joined our family, and we gave her such good new limbs that when I brought her into Government House at Halifax, where one of our nurses had taken her to school temporarily, and she ran into the room with two other little girls, the Governor could scarcely tell which was our little cripple Kirkina.
The following fall as we left for the South our good friend, the chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company, told me that on an island in the large inlet known to us as Eskimo Bay a native family, both hungry and naked, were living literally under the open sky. We promised to try and find them and help them with some warm clothing.