HEROES OF TO-DAY

HEROES OF TO-DAY

JOHN MUIR ⁂ JOHN BURROUGHS ⁂ WILFRED
GRENFELL ⁂ ROBERT F. SCOTT ⁂ SAMUEL
PIERPONT LANGLEY ⁂ EDWARD
TRUDEAU ⁂ BISHOP ROWE ⁂ JACOB A.
RIIS ⁂ HERBERT C. HOOVER
RUPERT BROOKE ⁂ GEORGE
W. GOETHALS

BY
MARY R. PARKMAN
Author of “Heroines of Service,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED WITH
PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1917
Copyright, 1916, 1917, by
The Century Co.
———
Published September, 1917
TO
MY FATHER

FOREWORD

Once, when I had been telling a group of children some stories of the heroes of old, one of the number who had always followed the tales with breathless interest, said:

“Tell us the story of a hero of to-day!”

“There are no heroes to-day, no real heroes, are there?” put in another. “Oh, of course I know there are great men who do important things,” he added, “but there isn’t any story to what they do, is there?—anything like the daring deeds of the knights and vikings, or of the American pioneers?”

Of course I tried to tell the children that the times in which we live bring out as true hero stuff as any time gone by. Nay, I grew quite eloquent in speaking of the many phases of our complex modern life with its many duties, its new conscience, its new feeling of individual responsibility for the welfare of all.

Then I told the stories of some of the heroes who are fighting “in the patient modern way,” not against flesh and blood with sword and spear, but against the unseen enemies of disease and pestilence; against the monster evils of ignorance, poverty and injustice. We decided that the “modern viking,” Jacob Riis, had a story that was as truly adventurous as those of the plundering vikings of long ago; that Dr. Grenfell, the strong friend of Labrador, had certainly proved that life might be a splendid adventure; and that the account of Captain Scott’s noble conquest of every danger and hardship, and at the last of disappointment and defeat itself, was indeed an “undying story.” Joyously we followed the trail of that splendid hero of the heights, John Muir, and of that gentle lover of the friendly by-paths of Nature, John Burroughs, and found that there was no spot in woods or fields, among mountains or streams, that did not have its wonder tale. The stories of those brave souls—like Edward Trudeau, the good physician of Saranac, and Samuel Pierpont Langley, the inventor of the heavier-than-air flying-machine, who struggled undaunted in the face of failure for a success that only those who should come after them might enjoy, were particularly inspiring. From them we turned to the heroic figure of the “prophet-engineer,” General Goethals, who proved that faith and perseverance can truly remove mountains; and Herbert C. Hoover, master of mines and of men, whose great talent for organization and efficient management brought bread to starving millions.

Carlyle has said that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” When the real history of our day is written, will it not be seen that some of its most important and significant chapters are those which have nothing to do with great cataclysms, such as the wars of nation against nation? Will it not be seen that the victories of peace are not only “no less renowned than war,” but that they are, in truth, the most enduring? These “heroes of to-day”—doctor, naturalist, explorer, missionary, engineer, inventor, journalist, patriot—workers for humanity in many places and in many ways, are indeed

“A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND: JOHN MUIR

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you
As sunshine into trees;
The winds will blow their freshness into you,
And the storms their energy;
While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
John Muir.

HEROES OF TO-DAY

THE LAIRD OF SKYLAND

A SMALL Scotch laddie was scrambling about on the storm-swept, craggy ruins of Dunbar Castle. He was not thinking of the thousand years that had passed over the grim fortress, or of the brave deeds, celebrated in legend and ballad, that its stones had witnessed. He was glorying in his own strength and daring that had won for him a foothold on the highest of the crumbling peaks, where he could watch the waves dash in spray, and where, with out-flung arms and face aglow with exultation, he felt himself a part of the scene. Sea, sky, rocks, and wild, boy heart seemed mingled together as one.

Little John Muir loved everything that was wild. The warnings and “skelpings” of his strict father could not keep him within the safe confines of the home garden. The true world was beyond—the salt meadows, with nests of skylarks and field-mice, the rocky pools along the shore where one might find crabs, eels, and all sorts of interesting scaly creatures. But above all, there were the rocky heights where one might climb.

Sometimes the truant was sent to bed without his supper. But even then he made opportunities for climbing feats. In company with his little brother David, John played games of “scootchers” (dares) in which the boys crept out of their dormer-windows and found congenial mountaineering exercise on the slate roof, sometimes hanging from the eaves by one hand, or even—for an instant—by a single finger.

It was only on Saturdays and during vacations, however, that these lads could taste the delights of roving. Johnnie Muir’s school-days began when he was not quite three years old. Can you picture the sturdy infant trudging along, with the sea-wind blowing out behind him like a flag the little green bag that his mother had hung around his neck to hold his first book? This infant had already learned his letters, however, from the shop signs, and it was not long before he passed the first mile-stone and spelled his way into the second book. When eight years old, John entered the grammar-school. Here he studied Latin and French, besides English, history, geography, and arithmetic. In regard to the methods employed, this doughty Scotchman used to say, with a twinkle: “We were simply driven pointblank against our books like a soldier against the enemy, and sternly ordered: ‘Up and at ’em! Commit your lessons to memory!’ If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped, for the grand, simple, Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”

From the school playground the boys loved to watch the ships at sea and guess where they were bound. In stormy weather, that brought the salt spume from the waves over the wall, they often saw the brave vessels tossed against the rocky shore. Many of John’s school-books showed ships at full sail on the margins, particularly the one that stirred his imagination most—the reader which told about the forests of America, with their wonderful birds and sugarmaple trees.

One evening, when John and David were loyally trying to forget dreams of voyages to magic lands where brave adventure awaited one at every turn, and master their lessons for the next day, their father came into the room with wonderful news.

“Bairns,” he said, “you need na learn your lessons the nicht, for we’re gaen to America the morn!”

How the words sang in their hearts! “America the morn!” Instead of grammar, a land where sugar-trees grew in ground full of gold; with forests where myriads of eagles, hawks, and pigeons circled about millions of birds’ nests; where deer hid in every thicket; and where there was never a gamekeeper to deny a lad the freedom of the woods!

Only their grandfather looked troubled, and said in a voice that trembled more than usual: “Ah, puir laddies! Ye’ll find something else ower the sea forby gold and birds’ nests and freedom frae lessons. Ye’ll find plenty of hard, hard work.”

But nothing could cast a shadow on their joy. “I’m gaen to Amaraka the morn!” they shouted to their envying, doubting schoolmates.

It took six weeks and a half for the old-fashioned sailing-vessel to cross the Atlantic. The father had taken three of the children, John, David, and Sarah, to help him make a home in the wilderness for the rest of the family. The spot selected was near Kingston, Wisconsin, then settled only by a few scattered, hardy pioneers. Here, with the help of their nearest neighbors, they built in a day a cabin of rough, bur-oak logs.

This hut was in the midst of the woods which fringed a flowery meadow and a lake where pond-lilies grew. The boys had not been at home an hour before they discovered a bluejay’s nest with three green eggs, and a woodpecker’s hole, and began to make acquaintance with the darting, gliding creatures of springs and lake.

“Here,” said John Muir, “without knowing it, we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.”

Soon farm life began in earnest. Fields were cleared and plowed; a frame house was built on the hill; and the mother with the younger children came to join these pioneers. It would seem that the long days of unceasing toil—planting, hoeing, harvesting, splitting rails, and digging wells—that retarded the growth of the active lad would have completely quenched the flickerings of his wild, eager spirit. But he managed to absorb, in the most astonishing way, the lore of woods and fields and streams, until the ways of birds, insects, fishes, and wild plant-neighbors were as an open book to him.

It was not long before his alert mind began to hunger for a real knowledge of the books which in his childish days he had studied without understanding. He read not only the small collection of religious books that his father had brought with him from Scotland, but also every stray volume that he could borrow from a neighbor.

When John was fifteen, he discovered that the poetry in the Bible, in Shakespeare, and in Milton could give something of the same keen joy that a Sunday evening on a hilltop made him feel, when sunset and rising moon and the hushed voices of twilight were all mingled in one thrilling delight. All beauty was one, he found.

The noble lines echoed in his memory as he cradled the wheat and raked the hay. The precious opportunities for reading were stolen five minutes at a time when he lingered in the kitchen with book and candle after the others had gone to bed. Night after night his father would call with exasperated emphasis: “John, do you expect me to call you every night? You must go to bed when the rest do.”

One night as he descended on the boy with more than usual sternness his anger was somewhat disarmed when he noticed that the book in question was a Church history. “If you will read,” he added, “get up in the morning. You may get up as early as you like.”

That night John went to bed wondering how he was going to wake himself in order to profit by this precious permission. Though his was the sound sleep of a healthy boy who had been splitting rails in the snowy woods, he sprang out of bed as if roused by a mysterious reveille long before daylight, and, holding his candle to the kitchen clock, saw that it was only one o’clock.

“Five hours to myself!” he cried exultingly. “It is like finding a day—a day for my very own!”

Realizing that his enthusiasm could not suffice to keep him warm in the zero weather, and that his father would certainly object to his making a fire, he went down cellar, and, by the light of a tallow dip, began work on the model of a self-setting sawmill that he had invented.

“I don’t think that I was any the worse for my short ration of sleep and the extra work in the cold and the uncertain light,” he said; “I was far more than happy. Like Tam o’ Shanter I was glorious—‘O’er all the ills of life victorious.”

When his sawmill was tested in a stream that he had dammed up in the meadow, he set himself to construct a clock that might have an attachment connected with his bed to get him up at a certain hour in the morning. He knew nothing of the mechanism of timepieces beyond the laws of the pendulum, but he succeeded in making a clock of wood, whittling the small pieces in the moments of respite from farm-work. At length the “early-rising machine” was complete and put in operation to his satisfaction. There was now no chance that the weary flesh would betray him into passing a precious half-hour of his time of freedom in sleep.

“John,” said his father, who had but two absorbing interests, his stern religion and his thriving acres, “John, what time is it when you get up in the morning?”

“About one o’clock,” replied the boy, tremblingly.

“What time is that to be stirring about and disturbing the whole family?”

“You told me, Father—” began John.

“I know I gave you that miserable permission,” said the man with a groan, “but I never dreamed that you would get up in the middle of the night.”

The boy wisely said nothing, and the blessed time for study and experimentation was not taken away.

Even his father seemed to take pride in the hickory clock that he next constructed. It was in the form of a scythe to symbolize Time, the pendulum being a bunch of arrows to suggest the flight of the minutes. A thermometer and barometer were next evolved, and automatic contrivances to light the fire and to feed the horses at a given time.

One day a friendly neighbor, who recognized that the boy was a real mechanical genius, advised him to take his whittled inventions to the State Fair at Madison. There two of his wooden clocks and the thermometer were given a place of honor in the Fine Arts Hall, where they attracted much attention. It was generally agreed that this farm-boy from the backwoods had a bright future.

A student from the university persuaded the young inventor that he might be able to work his way through college. Presenting himself to the dean in accordance with this friendly advice, young Muir told his story, explaining that except for a two-month term in the country he had not been to school since he had left Scotland in his twelfth year. He was received kindly, given a trial in the preparatory department, and after a few weeks transferred to the freshman class.

During the four years of his college life John Muir made his way by teaching school a part of each winter and doing farm-work summers. He sometimes cut down the expense of board to fifty cents a week by living on potatoes and mush, which he cooked for himself at the dormitory furnace. Pat, the janitor, would do anything for this young man who could make such wonderful things. Years afterward he pointed out his room to visitors and tried to describe the wonders it had contained. It had, indeed, looked like a branch of the college museum, with its numerous botanical and geological specimens and curious mechanical contrivances.

Although he spent four years at the State University, he did not take the regular course, but devoted himself chiefly to chemistry, physics, botany, and geology, which, he thought, would be most useful to him. Then, without graduating, he started out “on a glorious botanical and geological excursion which has lasted,” he said, in concluding the story of his early life, “for fifty years and is not yet completed.”

He journeyed afoot to Florida, sleeping on the ground wherever night found him. “I wish I knew where I was going,” he wrote to a friend who asked about his plans. “Only I know that I seem doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness.’ ”

Because he loved the whole fair earth and longed to know something of the story that its rocks and trees might tell, he wandered on and on. After going to Cuba, a siege of tropical fever, contracted by sleeping on swampy ground, caused him to give up for a time a cherished plan to make the acquaintance of the vegetation along the Amazon.

“Fate and flowers took me to California,” he said. He found there his true Florida (Land of Flowers), and he found, also, what became the passion of his life and his life work—the noble mountains, the great trees, and the marvelous Yosemite. Here he lived year after year, climbing the mountains, descending into the cañons, lovingly, patiently working to decipher the story of the rocks, and to make the wonder and beauty which thrilled his soul a heritage for mankind forever.

He lived for months at a time in the Yosemite Valley, whose marvels he knew in every mood of sunshine, moonlight, dawn, sunset, storm, and winter whiteness of frost and snow. He would wander for days on the heights without gun or any provisions except bread, tea, a tin cup, pocket-knife, and short-handled ax.

Once, on reading a magazine article by an enthusiastic young mountain-climber, who dilated upon his thrilling adventures in scaling Mount Tyndall, Mr. Muir commented dryly: “He must have given himself a lot of trouble. When I climbed Tyndall, I ran up and back before breakfast.”

At a time when trails were few and hard to find, he explored the Sierra, which, he said, should be called, not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. When night came, he selected the lee side of a log, made a fire, and went to sleep on a bed of pine-needles. If it was snowing, he made a bigger fire and lay closer to his log shelter.

“Outdoors is the natural place for man,” he said. “I begin to cough and wheeze the minute I get within walls.”

Never at a loss to make his way in the wilderness, he was completely bewildered in the midst of city streets.

“What is the nearest way out of town?” he asked of a man in the business section of San Francisco soon after he landed at the Golden Gate in 1868.

“But I don’t know where you want to go!” protested the surprised pedestrian.

“To any place that is wild,” he replied.

So began the days of his wandering in pathless places among higher rocks “than the world and his ribbony wife could reach.” “Climb the mountains, climb, if you would reach beauty,” said John Muir, the wild, eager spirit of the lad who had braved scoldings and “skelpings” to climb the craggy peaks of Dunbar shining in his eyes.

When his friends remonstrated with him because of the way he apparently courted danger, he replied: “A true mountaineer is never reckless. He knows, or senses with a sure instinct, what he can do. In a moment of real danger his whole body is eye, and common skill and fortitude are replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge.”

It was not entirely the passion for beauty that took this lover of the sublime aspects of nature up among the mountains and glaciers—“up where God is making the world.” It was also the passion for knowledge—the longing to know something of the tools the Divine Sculptor had used in carving the giant peaks and mighty cañons.

“The marvels of Yosemite are the end of the story,” he said. “The alphabet is to be found in the crags and valleys of the summits.”

Here he wandered about, comparing cañon with cañon, following lines of cleavage, and finding the key to every precipice and sloping wall in the blurred marks of the glaciers on the eternal rocks. Every boulder found a tongue; “in every pebble he could hear the sound of running water.” The tools that had carved the beauties of Yosemite were not, he concluded, those of the hidden fires of the earth, the rending of earthquake and volcanic eruption, but the slow, patient cleaving and breaking by mighty glaciers, during the eons when the earth’s surface was given over to the powers of cold—the period known as the Ice Age.

“There are no accidents in nature,” he said. “The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that keeps the stars in their places. Each bird-song is an echo of the universal harmony. Nature is one.”

Because he believed that Nature reveals many of her innermost secrets in times of storm, he often braved the wildest tempests on the heights. He spoke with keen delight of the times when he had been “magnificently snowbound in the Lord’s Mountain House.” He even dared to climb into the very heart of a snow-cloud as it rested on Pilot Peak, and it seemed that the experience touched the very springs of poetry in the soul of this nature-lover. He found that he had won in a moment “a harvest of crystal flowers, and wind-songs gathered from spiry firs and long, fringy arms of pines.”

Once in a terrible gale he climbed to the top of a swaying pine in order to feel the power of the wind as a tree feels it. His love for the trees was second only to his love for the mountains. His indignation at the heedless destruction of the majestic Sequoias knew no bounds. “Through thousands and thousands of years God has cared for these trees,” he said: “He has saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining and leveling tempests and floods, but He cannot save them from foolish men.”

It was due mainly to his untiring efforts that the “big trees” of California, as well as the wonderful Yosemite Valley, were taken under the protection of the Nation to be preserved for all the people for all time.

He discovered the petrified forests of Arizona, and went to Chile to see trees of the same species which are no longer to be found anywhere in North America. He traveled to Australia to see the eucalyptus groves, to Siberia for its pines, and to India to see the banyan-trees. When asked why he had not stopped at Hong Kong when almost next door to that interesting city, he replied, “There are no trees in Hong Kong.”

In order to make a livelihood that would permit him to continue his studies of nature in the mountains, Mr. Muir built a sawmill where he prepared for the use of man those trees “that the Lord had felled.” Here during the week he jotted down his observations or sketched, while he watched out of the tail of his eye to see when the great logs were nearing the end of their course. Then he would pause in his writing or sketching just long enough to start a new log on its way.

Sometimes he undertook the work of a shepherd, and, while his “mutton family of 1800 ranged over ten square miles,” he found time for reading and botanizing.

A very little money sufficed for his simple needs. Indeed, Mr. Muir once declared that he could live on fifty dollars a year.

“Eat bread in the mountains,” he said, “with love and adoration in your soul, and you can get a nourishment that food experts have no conception of.”

He spoke with pitying scorn of the money-clinking crowd who were too “time-poor” to enjoy the keenest delights that earth can offer.

“You millionaires carry too heavy blankets to get any comfort out of the march through life,” he said; “you don’t know what it is you are losing by the way.”

When there was a home and “bairnies” to provide for, he managed a fruit-ranch; but he was often absent in his beloved mountains weeks at a time, living on bread, tea, and the huckleberries of cool, glacial bogs, which were more to his taste than the cherries or grapes that he had to return in time to harvest.

Mr. S. Hall Young, in his interesting narrative “Alaska Days with John Muir,” gives a graphic account of the way John o’ Mountains climbed:

Then Muir began to slide up that mountain. I had been with mountain-climbers before, but never one like him. A deer-lope over the smoother slopes, a sure instinct for the easiest way into a rocky fortress, an instant and unerring attack, a serpent glide up the steep; eye, hand, and foot all connected dynamically; with no appearance of weight to his body—as though he had Stockton’s negative-gravity machine strapped on his back.

In all his mountain-climbing in the Sierras, the Andes, and the high Himalayas, he never knew what it was to be dizzy, even when standing on the sheerest precipice, or crossing a crevasse on a sliver of ice above an abyss of four thousand feet. He said that his simple laws of health gave him his endurance and his steady nerves; but when we think of the wee laddie in Scotland, hanging from the roof by one finger, or balancing himself on a particularly sharp crag of the black headland at Dunbar, we believe that he was born to climb.

“I love the heights,” he said, “where the air is sweet enough for the breath of angels, and where I can feel miles and miles of beauty flowing into me.”

He never ceased to marvel at the people who remained untouched in the presence of Nature’s rarest loveliness. “They have eyes and see not,” he mourned, as he saw some sleek, comfortable tourists pausing a moment in their concern about baggage to point casually with their canes to the Upper Yosemite Falls, coming with its glorious company of shimmering comets out of a rainbow cloud along the top of the cliff, and passing into another cloud of glory below.

All of Mr. Muir’s books—“The Mountains of California,” “Our National Parks,” “My First Summer in the Sierra,” and “The Yosemite”—are splendid invitations to “climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” “Climb, if you would see beauty!” every page cries out. “If I can give you a longing that will take you out of your rocking-chairs and make you willing to forego a few of your so-called comforts for something infinitely more worth while, I shall have fulfilled my mission.”

Read his story of his ride on the avalanche from a ridge three thousand feet high, where he had climbed to see the valley in its garment of newly-fallen snow. The ascent took him nearly all day, the descent about a minute. When he felt himself going, he instinctively threw himself on his back, spread out his arms to keep from sinking, and found his “flight in the milky way of snow-stars the most spiritual and exhilarating of all modes of motion.”

In “The Yosemite,” also, we learn how a true nature-lover can meet the terrors of an earthquake. He was awakened at about two o’clock one moonlit morning by a “strange, thrilling motion,” and exalted by the certainty that he was going to find the old planet off guard and learn something of her true nature, he rushed out while the ground was rocking so that he had to balance himself as one does on shipboard during a heavy sea. He saw Eagle Rock fall in a thousand boulder-fragments, while all the thunder he had ever heard was condensed in the roar of that moment when it seemed that “the whole earth was, like a living creature, calling to its sister planets.”

“Come, cheer up!” he cried to a panic-stricken man who felt that the ground was about to swallow him up; “smile and clap your hands now that kind Mother Earth is trotting us on her knee to amuse us and make us good.”

He studied the earthquake as he studied the glaciers, the scarred cliffs, and the flowers, and this is the lesson that it taught him:

All Nature’s wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring waves, and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort—each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature’s heart.

Read about his adventure in a storm on the Alaska glacier with the little dog, Stickeen. You will note that he had eyes not only for the ice-cliffs towering above the dark forest and

for the mighty glacier with its rushing white fountains, but also for the poor “beastie” who was leaving blood-prints on the ice when the man stopped to make him moccasins out of his handkerchief. As you read you will not wonder that this man who could write about Nature’s loftiest moods could also write that most beautiful and truly sympathetic of all stories of dog life.

The last years of John Muir’s long career were, like the rest, part of “the glorious botanical and geological excursion,” on which he set out when he left college. The names that he won—“John o’ Mountains,” “The Psalmist of the Sierra,” “The Father of the Yosemite”—all speak of his work. Remembering that he found his fullest joy in climbing to the topmost peaks, we have called him “The Laird of Skyland.” Going to the mountains was going home, he said.

The Muir Woods of “big trees” near San Francisco and Muir Glacier in Alaska are fitting monuments to his name and fame. But the real man needs no memorial. For when we visit the glorious Yosemite, which his untiring efforts won for us and which his boundless enthusiasm taught us rightly to appreciate, we somehow feel that the spirit of John Muir is still there, in the beauty that he loved, bidding us welcome and giving us joy in the freedom of the heights.

THE SEER OF WOODCHUCK LODGE: JOHN BURROUGHS

In every man’s life we may read some lesson. What may be read in mine? If I see myself correctly, it is this: that the essential things are always at hand; that one’s own door opens upon the wealth of heaven and earth; and that all things are ready to serve and cheer one. Life is a struggle, but not a warfare; it is a day’s labor, but labor on God’s earth, under the sun and stars with other laborers, where we may think and sing and rejoice as we work.

John Burroughs.

SOME farm-boys were having a happy Sunday in the woods gathering black birch and wintergreens. As they lay on the cool moss, lazily tasting the spicy morsels they had found and gazing up at the patches of blue sky through the beeches, one of the boys caught sight of a small, bluish bird, with an odd white spot on its wing, as it flashed through the trembling leaves. In a moment it was gone, but the boy was on his feet, looking after it with eyes that had opened on a new world.

So “Deacon Woods,” the old familiar playground that he thought he knew so well, where blue-jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-birds were every-day companions, contained wonders of which he had never dreamed. The older brothers knew nothing and cared nothing about the unknown bird. What difference did it make, anyway? But the little lad of seven who followed its flight with startled, wondering eyes seemed to have been born again. His eyes were opened to many things that had not existed for him before.

Do you remember the story of the monk of long ago who, while copying in his cell a page from the Holy Book, chanced to ponder on the words that tell us that a thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day? As the monk wondered and doubted how such a thing might be, he heard through his window the song of a strange, beautiful bird, and followed it through the garden into the woods beyond. Wandering on and listening, with every sense alive to the delights about him, it seemed that he had spent the happiest hour he had ever known. But when he returned to his monastery, he found himself a stranger in a place that had long forgotten him. He had been wandering for a hundred years in the magic wood, listening to the song of the wonderful bird.

In somewhat the same way John Burroughs followed where the gleam of the little bluish warbler led him through woods and fields for more than seventy years. That is why Time missed him out of the great reckoning. One who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.

Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden meaning. He has sight, then, and also insight. He looks with his physical eyes and also with the eyes of the mind and spirit.

We always think of a seer as an old man, but little John Burroughs—John o’ Birds, as some one has called him—began to be “an eye among the blind” that Sunday in the woods when he was a lad of seven. He led a new, charmed life as he weeded the garden and later plowed the fields. He saw and heard life thrilling about him on every side, and all that he saw became part of his own life. He drank in the joy of the bobolink and the song-sparrow with the air he breathed, as the warm sunshine and good, earth smell of the freshly turned furrow entered at every pore.

Another day almost as memorable as that which brought the flash of the strange bird was the one which gave him a glimpse into the unexplored realm of ideas. A lady visiting at the farm-house noticed a boyish drawing of his, and said, “What taste that boy has!” Taste, then, might belong to something besides the food that one took into one’s mouth. It seemed that there were new worlds of words—and thoughts—of which his farmer folk little dreamed.

Again, one day when watching some roadmakers down by the school-house turn up some flat stones, he heard a man standing by exclaim, “Ah, here we have, perhaps, some antiquities!” Antiquities! How the word rang in his fancy for days! Oh, the magic lure of the world of words!

It seemed that school and books might give him the freedom of that world. He went to the district school at Roxbury, New York, summers until he was ten, when his help was needed on the farm. After that, he was permitted to go only during the winters. In many ways he was the odd one of the family, and his unaccountable interest in things that could never profit a farmer often tried the patience of his hard-working father.

One day the boy asked for money to buy an algebra. What was an algebra, anyway, and why should this queer lad be demanding things that his father and brothers had never had? John got the algebra, and other precious books beside, but he earned the money himself by selling maple sugar. He knew when April had stirred the sap in the sugar-bush a week or more before any one else came to tap the trees, and his early harvest always found a good market.

And what a joyous time April was! “I think April is the best month to be born in,” said John Burroughs. “One is just in time, so to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April chickens are always the best.... Then are heard the voices of April—arriving birds, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sun-down, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising from the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny slopes. April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds—like that of the phœbe-bird or of the meadow-lark.”

The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing earth—the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the days brought—were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on the way.

When the time drew near, however, it proved as strange and unusual a desire as that for the algebra. The district school had been good enough for his brothers. So he put his disappointment behind him as he went for another winter to the Roxbury school. “Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all,” said Mr. Burroughs; “the long, long thoughts, the earnest resolve to make myself worthy, the awakening of every part and fiber of me, helped me on my way as far, perhaps, as the unattainable academy could have done.”

The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and phœbe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear, laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump, and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries—dewy dreams of daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks.

In October the long term was over and he went home with nearly all his earnings,—over fifty dollars,—enough to pay his way at the Hedding Literary Institute for the winter term.

In the spring of 1855 he went to New York City for the first time, hoping to find a position as teacher. He was not successful in this quest, but the trip was memorable for a raid on the second-hand book-stalls. He reached home some days later “with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.”

Always attracted chiefly to essays, the works of Emerson influenced him greatly. He absorbed their spirit as naturally and completely as he had absorbed the sights and sounds of his native hill-country. His first article—an essay called “Expression,” which was printed without signature in The Atlantic Monthly—was by many attributed to Emerson. Lowell, who was at that time editor of The Atlantic, told, with much amusement, that before accepting the contribution he had looked through all of Emerson’s works expecting to find it and confound this plagiarizing Burroughs with a proof of his rascality.

While teaching school near West Point he one day found, in the library of the Military Academy, a volume of Audubon—and entered upon his kingdom. Here was a complete chart of that bird world which he had never ceased to long to explore since that memorable day when he had seen the little blue warbler. There was time, too, for long walks, time to live with the birds—to revive old ties as well as to make new friends.

In speaking of his study of the birds, Mr. Burroughs once said:

“What joy the birds have brought me! How they have given me wings to escape the tedious and deadly. Studied the birds? No, I have played with them, camped with them, summered and wintered with them. My knowledge of them has come to me through the pores of my skin, through the air I have breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the leaves and the glint of the waters.”

At once he felt a longing to write something of the joy he was gaining through this comradeship with his feathered friends. There was nothing that spoke of Emerson or any other model in his pages now. He had found his own path. He was following the little blue bird into a world of his own.

A chance came to go to Washington to live. For several years, while working as a clerk in the Treasury, he spent all his spare moments with the birds. He knew what nests were to be found near Rock Creek and along Piney Branch. It seemed that he heard the news as soon as a flock of northbound songsters stopped to rest for a day or two in the Capitol grounds.

While watching a vault where great piles of the Nation’s gold lay stored, he lived over in memory the golden days of his boyhood spent in climbing trees, tramping over hills, and through grassy hollows, or lying with half-shut eyes by the brookside to learn something of the life-story of the birds. There were leisure afternoons which brought no duty save that of sitting watchful before the iron wall of the vault. At such times he often tried to seize some of the happy bits that memory brought, a twig here, a tuft there, and now a long, trailing strand—stray scraps of observation of many sorts—which he wove together into a nest for his brooding fancy. And we, too, as we read those pages hear the “wandering voice” of the little bird of earth and sky, who wears the warm brown of one on his breast and the blue of the other on his wings; we see the dauntless robin a-tilt on the sugar-bush; we catch the golden melody of the wood-thrush—and “the time of singing birds” has come to our hearts. He has not only seeing eyes, but an understanding heart, this seer and lover of the birds, and so his bits of observation have meaning and value. He called the book in which these various bird-papers were gathered together “Wake Robin,” the name of a wild-flower that makes its appearance at the time of the return of the birds.

This book was well named, not only because it suggested something of the spirit and feeling of the essays, but also because it was the herald of several other delightful volumes such as “Signs and Seasons,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets.”

Do you remember how Emerson says in his poem “Each and All”

I thought the sparrow’s note from Heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.

When John Burroughs writes about the birds, he brings with their life and song the feeling of the “perfect whole”—the open fields, the winding river, the bending sky, and the cool, fragrant woods. For he always gives, with the glimpses of nature that he culls, something of himself, something of his own clear-seeing, open-hearted appreciation.

The ten years spent in Washington were memorable not only for his first success as a nature writer, but also for the experiences brought through the Civil War and his friendship with the “good gray poet,” Walt Whitman. Years after, Mr. Burroughs said that his not having gone into the army was probably the greatest miss of his life. He went close enough to the firing-line on one occasion to hear “the ping of a rifle-bullet overhead, and the thud it makes when it strikes the ground.” Surely there should be enough of the spirit of his grandfather, who was one of Washington’s Valley Forge veterans, to make a soldier! How well he remembered the old Continental’s thrilling tales as they angled for trout side by side, graybeard and eager urchin of nine! How well he remembered the hair-raising stories of witches and ghosts that made many shadowy spots spook-ridden. He had learned to stand his ground in the woods at nightfall, and at the edge of the big black hole under the barn, and so to put to flight the specters before and the phantoms behind. But when, that night on the battle-field, he saw a company of blue-coated men hurrying toward a line of rifle-flashes that shone luridly against the horizon, he concluded that his grandfather had “emptied the family powder-horn” in those Revolutionary days, and that there was no real soldier stuff in the grandson.

If his failure to enlist in the army was the greatest miss of his life, his friendship with Whitman was its greatest gain. They took to the open road together, the best of boon companions, and Burroughs came to know the poet as he knew the birds. His essay “The Flight of the Eagle,” is one of the most spirited and heartfelt tributes that one great man ever paid another.

One should, however, hear Mr. Burroughs talk about the poet and watch his kindling enthusiasm. He had been teaching us how to roast shad under the ashes of our camp-fire one day when a chance remark put him in a reminiscent mood. We all felt that evening as if we had come in actual touch with the poet.

“You see,” our host concluded, “Whitman was himself his own best poem—a man, take him all in all. Do you remember how George Eliot said of Emerson, ‘He is the first man I have ever met’? Many people felt that way about Whitman.”

As I looked at Whitman’s friend I found myself thinking, “Surely here is a man, take him all in all—a man in whom the child’s heart, the youth’s vision, the poet’s enthusiasm, the scientist’s faithfulness, and the thinker’s insight, are all wonderfully blended.”

After the years in Washington, his work as a bank examiner made Mr. Burroughs seek a place for his home near New York City. The spot selected was a small farm on the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie, which he called Riverby. Here, in his eager delight over the planting of his roof-tree, he helped, so far as his time permitted, in the building, placing many of the rough-hewn stones himself. He tells with some relish a story of the Scotch mason, who, on looking back one evening as he was being ferried across to his home on the east shore of the river, saw, to his great anger another man at work on his job. Returning in fury to see why he had been supplanted, he surprised the owner himself in the act of putting in place some of the stones for the chimney.

“Weel, you are a hahndy malm!” he exclaimed.

The big river never appealed to Mr. Burroughs, however, as the friendly Pepacton and the other silver-clear streams where he had caught trout as a boy. It brought too close the noise of the world, the fever of getting and spending. Besides, its rising and ebbing tides, its big steamers and busy tugs, its shad and herring, were all strange to him; his boyhood home had known nothing of these things.

He built for himself a bark-covered retreat some two miles back from the river in a bowl-shaped hollow among the thickly wooded hills. “Slabsides,” as he called this human bird’s-nest, was a two-story shack of rough-hewn timbers.

“One of the greatest pleasures of life is to build a house for one’s self,” he said; “there is a peculiar satisfaction even in planting a tree from which you hope to eat the fruit or in the shade of which you hope to repose. But how much greater the pleasure in planting the roof-tree, the tree that bears the golden apples of hospitality. What is a man’s house but his nest, and why should it not be nest-like, both outside and in, snug and well-feathered and modeled by the heart within?”

Many guests climbed the steep, rocky trail and enjoyed the hospitality of this retreat, among others President Roosevelt and his wife. The naturalist, whom Colonel Roosevelt affectionately called “Oom John,” cooked the dinner himself, bringing milk and butter from his cave refrigerator, broiling the chicken, and preparing the lettuce, celery, and other vegetables which grew in the rich black mold of the hollow. As he prepared and served the meal with all the ease of a practised camper there was never a halt in the talk of these two great lovers of the outdoor world. If the poet-sage who deplored that

Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind

could have spent a day with John Burroughs, he would have found one man, at least, who never knew the tyranny of possessions, and so was never possessed by them. He is the type of the sane, happy human being who, while journeying through life, has taken time to live by the way. He knows the enchanting by-paths of existence, the friendly trails that wind over meadows and hills.

“I am in love with this world,” he says; “I have nestled lovingly in it. It has been home. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. While I delved, I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its bread and meat for my soul.”

Though the whole wide out-of-doors is home to John Burroughs, there is one spot that is more than any other the abiding-place of his affections. This is the country of his childhood in the Catskills. Here he spends his summers now at Woodchuck Lodge, a cottage about half a mile from the old homestead. Here he is happy in a way that he can be nowhere else. The woods and fields are flesh of his flesh, the mountains are father and mother to him.

A day with John Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge will always seem torn from the calendar of ordinary living, a day apart, free, wholesome, and untouched by petty care. His world is indeed “so full of a number of things” that all who come within the spell of its serene content are “as happy as kings.”

As he makes whistles of young shoots of dogwood for his small grandson he tells of his school-days, when necessity taught his hand the cunning to make his own pens, slate-pencils, and ink-wells. “And they were a very good sort, too,” he adds. “Those were home-made days. I remember my homespun shirts, made of our own flax, yellow at first and as good as ever hair-shirt could have been in the way of scratching penance. All my playthings were home-made. How well I remember my trout-lines of braided horsehair, and the sawmill in the brook that actually cut up the turnips, apples, and cucumbers that I proudly fed it.”

“These, too, are home-made days of the best sort,” we think as we look about the rustic porch and chairs made of silvery birch, and at the silver-haired seer, surrounded by his grandchildren and the friends who gather about him with the happy feeling of being most entirely at home.

“You like my chairs with the bark on?” he says. “It’s a sort of hobby of mine to see how the natural forks and crooks and elbows which I discover in the saplings and tree-boles can be coaxed into serving my turn about the house, and I make it a point to use them as nearly as possible as they grow.”

We sit on the porch at his feet, watching the chipmunks frisk along the fences and the woodchucks creep furtively out of their holes. We do not speak for several long minutes, because we want to taste the quiet life he loves in the heart of the blue hills. We fancy that we can hear in the twitter of the tree-tops a clearly understood mingling of familiar voices, and that we feel in our hearts an answering echo that proves us truly akin to the creatures in feathers and fur.

“Home sights and sounds are best of all,” says our friend, as he gazes across at the purple shadows on Old Clump. “The sublime beauty of the Yosemite touched me with wonder and awe, but when I heard the robin’s note it touched my heart. Bright Angel Creek in the Grand Cañon found its way into the innermost recesses of my consciousness in the moment when it reminded me of the trout-stream at home.”

There is another pause, in which the silver-clear notes of the vesper-sparrow come to us with their “Peace, good will and good night.”

“I think I am something like a turtle in the way I love to poke about in narrow fields,” he adds whimsically; “but why should I rush hither and yon to see things when I can see constellations from my own door-step?”

And so it is indeed true that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge can still find in a ramble among his own hills the land of wonder and beauty which he found as a boy when he followed the flash of the unknown bird, and in the glowing twilight of his years, with eyes that look into the heart and meaning of things, can, from his door-step, trace constellations undreamed of by day.

THE DEEP-SEA DOCTOR: WILFRED GRENFELL

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;

But he rose upon their decks, and he cried:
“I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do;
With a joyful spirit I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!”

How these lines sang in his memory! Is it any wonder that the lad who heard this story as one among many thrilling tales of his own people should have felt that life was a splendid adventure?

As a boy in his home at Parkgate, near Chester, England, he was early accustomed to strenuous days in the open. He knew the stretches of sand-banks,—the famous “Sands of Dee,”—with their deep, intersecting “gutters” where many curlews, mallards, and other water-birds sought hiding. In his rocking home-made boat he explored from end to end the estuary into which the River Dee flowed, now and again hailing a fishing-smack for a tow home, if evening fell too soon, and sharing with the crew their supper of boiled shrimps. He seemed to know as by instinct the moods of the tides and storm-vexed waves, which little boats must learn to watch and circumvent. He became a lover, also, of wild nature—birds, animals, and plants—and of simple, vigorous men who lived rough, wholesome lives in the open.

Though he went from the boys’ school at Parkgate to Marlborough College, and later to Oxford, he had at this time no hint of the splendid adventures that life offers in the realm of mental and spiritual activities. Rugby football, in which he did his share to uphold the credit of the university, certainly made the most vital part of this chapter of his life. It was not until he took up the study of medicine at the London Hospital that he began to appreciate the value of knowledge “because it enables one to do things.”

There was one day of this study-time in London that made a change in the young doctor’s whole life. Partly out of curiosity, he followed a crowd in the poorer part of the city, into a large tent, where a religious meeting was being held. In a moment he came to realize that his religion had been just a matter of believing as he was taught, of conducting himself as did those about him, and of going to church on Sunday. It seemed that here, however, were men to whom religion was as real and practical a thing as the rudder is to a boat. All at once he saw what it would mean to have a strong guiding power in one’s life.

His mind seemed wonderfully set free. There were no longer conflicting aims, ideals, uncertainties, and misgivings. There was one purpose, one desire—to enter “the service that is perfect freedom,” the service of the King of Kings. Life was indeed a glorious adventure, whose meaning was plain and whose end sure.

How he enjoyed his class of unruly boys from the slums! Most people would have considered them hopeless “toughs.” He saw that they were just active boys, eager for life, who had been made what they were by unwholesome surroundings. “All they need is to get hold of the rudder and to feel the breath of healthy living in their faces,” he said. He fitted up one of his rooms with gymnasium material and taught the boys to box. He took them for outings into the country. When he saw the way they responded to this little chance for happy activity, he became one of the founders of the Lads’ Brigades and Lads’ Camps, which have done the same sort of good in England that the Boy Scouts organization has done in this country.

When he completed his medical course, the young doctor looked about for a field that would give chance for adventure and for service where a physician was really needed.

“I feel there is something for me besides hanging out my sign in a city where there are already doctors and to spare,” he said.

“Why don’t you see what can be done with a hospital-ship among the North Sea fishermen?” said Sir Frederick Treves, who was a great surgeon and a master mariner as well.

When Dr. Grenfell heard about how sick and injured men suffered for lack of care when on their long fishing-expeditions, he decided to fall in with this suggestion. He joined the staff of the Mission to Deep-sea Fishermen, and fitted out the first hospital-ship to the North Sea fisheries, which cruised about from the Bay of Biscay to Iceland, giving medical aid where it was often desperately needed.

When this work was well established, and other volunteers offered to take it up, Dr. Grenfell sought a new world of adventure. Hearing of the forlorn condition of the English-speaking settlers and natives on the remote shores of wind-swept Labrador, he resolved to fit out a hospital-ship and bring them what help he could. So began in 1892 Dr. Grenfell’s great work with his schooner Albert, in which he cruised about for three months and ministered to nine hundred patients, who, but for him, would have had no intelligent care.

Can you picture Labrador as something more than a pink patch on the cold part of the map? That strip of coast northwest of Newfoundland is a land of sheer cliffs broken by deep fiords, like much of Norway. Rocky islands and hidden reefs make the shores dangerous to ships in the terrific gales that are of frequent occurrence. But this forbidding, wreck-strewn land of wild, jutting crags has a weird beauty of its own. Picture it in winter when the deep snow has effaced all inequalities of surface and the dark spruces alone stand out against the gleaming whiteness. The fiords and streams are bound in an icy silence which holds the sea itself in thrall. Think of the colors of the moonlight on the ice, and the flaming splendor of the northern lights. Then picture it when summer has unloosed the land from the frozen spell. Mosses, brilliant lichens, and bright berries cover the rocky ground, the evergreens stand in unrivaled freshness, and gleaming trout and salmon dart out of the water, where great ice-bergs go floating by like monster fragments of the crystal city of the frost giants, borne along now by the arctic current to tell the world about the victory of the sun over the powers of cold in the far North.

When Dr. Grenfell sailed about in the Albert that first summer, the people thought he was some strange, big-hearted madman, who bore a charmed life. He seemed to know nothing and care nothing about foamy reefs, unfamiliar tides and currents, and treacherous winds. When it was impossible to put out in the schooner, he went in a whale-boat, which was worn out—honorably discharged from service—after a single season. The people who guarded the lives of their water-craft with jealous care shook their heads. Truly, the man must be mad. His boat was capsized, swamped, blown on the rocks, and once driven out to sea by a gale that terrified the crew of the solidly built mailboat. This time he was reported lost, but after a few days he appeared in the harbor of St. John’s, face aglow, and eyes fairly snapping with the zest of the conflict.

“Sure, the Lord must kape an eye on that man,” said an old skipper, devoutly.

It was often said of a gale on the Labrador coast, “That’s a wind that’ll bring Grenfell.” The doctor, impatient of delays, and feeling the same exhilaration in a good stiff breeze that a lover of horses feels in managing a spirited thoroughbred, never failed to make use of a wind that might help send him on his way.

What sort of people are these to whom Dr. Grenfell ministers? They are, as you might think, simple, hardy men, in whom ceaseless struggle against bleak conditions of life has developed strength of character and capacity to endure. Besides the scattered groups of Eskimos in the north, who live by hunting seal and walrus, and the Indians who roam the interior in search of furs, there are some seven or eight thousand English-speaking inhabitants widely scattered along the coast. In summer as many as thirty thousand fishermen are drawn from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to share in the profit of the cod-and salmon-fisheries. All of these people were practically without medical care before Dr. Grenfell came. Can you imagine what this meant? This is the story of one fisherman in his own words:

“I had a poisoned finger. It rose up and got very bad. I did not know what to do, so I took a passage on a schooner and went to Halifax. It was nine months before I was able to get back, as there was no boat going back before the winter. It cost me seventy-five dollars, and my hand was the same as useless, as it was so long before it was treated.”

Another told of having to wait nine days after “shooting his hand” before he could reach a doctor; and he had made the necessary journey in remarkably good time at that. He did not know if he ought to thank the doctor for saving his life when it was too late to save his hand. What can a poor fisherman do without a hand?

The chief sources of danger to these people who live by the food of the sea are the uncertain

winds and the treacherous ice-floes. When the ice begins to break in spring, the swift currents move great masses along with terrific force. Then woe betide the rash schooner that ventures into the path of these ice-rafts! For a moment she pushes her way among the floating “pans” or cakes of ice. All at once the terrible jam comes. The schooner is caught like a rat in a trap. The jaws of the ice monster never relax, while the timbers of the vessel crack and splinter and the solid deck-beams arch up, bow fashion, and snap like so many straws. Then, perhaps, the pressure changes. With a sudden shift of the wind a rift comes between the huge ice-masses, and the sea swallows its prey.

It is a strange thing that but few of the fishermen know how to swim. “You see, we has enough o’ the water without goin’ to bother wi’ it when we are ashore,” one old skipper told the doctor in explanation.

The only means of rescue when one finds himself in the water is a line or a pole held by friends until a boat can be brought to the scene. Many stories might be told of the bravery of these people and their instant willingness to serve each other. Once a girl, who saw her brother fall through a hole in the ice, ran swiftly to the spot, while the men who were trying to reach the place with their boat shouted to her to go back. Stretching full length, however, on the gradually sinking ice, she held on to her brother till the boat forced its way to them.

Perhaps the most terrible experience that has come to the brave doctor was caused by the ice-floes. It was on Easter Sunday in 1908 when word came to the hospital that a boy was very ill in a little village sixty miles away. The doctor at once got his “komatik,” or dog-sledge, in readiness and his splendid team of eight dogs, who had often carried him through many tight places. Brin, the leader, was the one who could be trusted to keep the trail when all signs and landmarks were covered by snow and ice. There were also Doc, Spy, Jack, Sue, Jerry, Watch, and Moody—each no less beloved for his own strong points and faithful service.

It was while crossing an arm of the sea, a ten-mile run on salt-water ice, that the accident occurred. An unusually heavy sea had left great openings between enormous blocks or “pans” of ice a little to seaward. It seemed, however, that the doctor could be sure of a safe passage on an ice-bridge, that though rough, was firmly packed, while the stiff sea-breeze was making it stronger moment by moment through driving the floating pans toward the shore. But all at once there came a sudden change in the wind. It began to blow from the land, and in a moment the doctor realized that his ice-bridge had broken asunder and the portion on which he found himself was separated by a widening chasm from the rest. He was adrift on an ice-pan.

It all happened so quickly that he was unable to do anything but cut the harness of the dogs to keep them from being tangled in the traces and dragged down after the sled. He found himself soaking wet, his sledge, with his extra clothing, gone, and only the remotest chance of being seen from the lonely shore and rescued. If only water had separated him from the bank, he might have tried swimming, but, for the most part, between the floating pans was “slob ice,” that is, ice broken into tiny bits by the grinding together of the huge masses.

Night came, and with it such intense cold that he was obliged to sacrifice three of his dogs and clothe himself in their skins to keep from freezing, for coat, hat, and gloves had been lost in the first struggle to gain a place on the largest available “pan” of ice. Then, curled up among the remaining dogs, and so, somewhat protected from the bitter wind, he fell asleep.

When daylight came, he took off his gaily-colored shirt, which was a relic of his football days, and, with the leg bones of the slain dogs as a pole, constructed a flag of distress. The warmth of the sun brought cheer; and so, even though his reason told him that there was but the smallest chance of being seen, he stood up and waved his flag steadily until too weary to make another move. Every time he sat down for a moment of rest, “Doc” came and licked his face and then went to the edge of the ice, as if to suggest it was high time to start.

At last Dr. Grenfell thought he saw the gleam of an oar. He could hardly believe his eyes, which were, indeed, almost snow-blinded, as his dark glasses had been lost with all his other things. Then—yes—surely there was the keel of a boat, and a man waving to him! In a moment came the blessed sound of a friendly voice.

Now that the struggle was over, he felt himself lifted into the boat as in a dream. In the same way he swallowed the hot tea which they had brought in a bottle. This is what one of the rescuers said, in telling about it afterward:

“When we got near un, it didn’t seem like ’t was the doctor. ’E looked so old an’ ’is face such a queer color. ’E was very solemn-like when us took un an’ the dogs in th’ boat. Th’ first thing ’e said was how wonderfu’ sorry ’e was o’ gettin’ into such a mess an’ givin’ we th’ trouble o’ comin’ out for un. Then ’e fretted about the b’y ’e was goin’ to see, it bein’ too late to reach un, and us to’ un ’is life was worth more ’n the b’y, fur ’e could save others. But ’e still fretted.”

They had an exciting time of it, reaching the shore. Sometimes they had to jump out and force the ice-pans apart; again, when the wind packed the blocks together too close, they had to drag the boat over.

When the bank was gained at last and the doctor dressed in the warm clothes that the fishermen wear, they got a sledge ready to take him to the hospital, where his frozen hands and feet could be treated. There, too, the next day the sick boy was brought, and his life saved.

Afterward, in telling of his experience, the thing which moved the doctor most was the sacrifice of his dogs. In his hallway a bronze tablet was placed with this inscription:

TO THE MEMORY OF
THREE NOBLE DOGS
MOODY
WATCH
SPY
WHOSE LIVES WERE GIVEN
FOR MINE ON THE ICE
APRIL 21ST, 1908
WILFRED GRENFELL

In his old home in England his brother put up a similar tablet, adding these words, “Not one of them is forgotten before your Father which is in heaven.”

Besides caring for the people himself, Dr. Grenfell won the interest of other workers—doctors, nurses, and teachers. Through his efforts, hospitals, schools, and orphan-asylums have been built. Of all the problems, however, with which this large-hearted, practical friend of the deep-sea fishermen has had to deal in his Labrador work, perhaps the chief was that of the dire poverty of the people. It seemed idle to try to cure men of ills which were the direct result of conditions under which they lived.

When the doctor began his work in 1892 he found that the poverty-stricken people were practically at the mercy of unprincipled, scheming storekeepers who charged two or three prices for flour, salt, and other necessaries of life. The men, as a result, were always in debt, mortgaging their next summer’s catch of fish long before the winter was over. To cure this evil, Grenfell opened coöperative stores, run solely for the benefit of the fishermen, and established industries that would give a chance of employment during the cold months. A grant of timberland was obtained from the government and a lumber-mill opened. A schooner-building yard, and a cooperage for making kegs and barrels to hold the fish exported, were next installed.

This made it possible to gather together the people, who were formerly widely scattered because dependent on food gained through hunting and trapping. This made it possible, too, to carry out plans for general improvement—schools for the children and some social life. Two small jails, no longer needed in this capacity, were converted into clubs, with libraries and games. Realizing the general need for healthful recreation, the doctor introduced rubber footballs, which might be used in the snow. The supply of imported articles could not keep pace with the demand, however. All along the coast, young and old joined in the game. Even the Eskimo women, with wee babies in their hoods, played with their brown-faced boys and girls, using sealskin balls stuffed with dry grass.

Knowing that Labrador can never hope to do much in agriculture, as even the cabbages and potatoes frequently suffer through summer frosts, the doctor tried to add to the resources of the country by introducing a herd of reindeer from Lapland, together with three families of Lapps to teach the people how to care for them. Reindeer milk is rich and makes good cheese. Moreover, the supply of meat and leather they provide is helping to make up for the falling-off in the number of seals, due to unrestricted hunting. The transportation afforded by the reindeer is also important in a land where rapid transit consists of dog-sledges.

Dr. Grenfell has himself financed his various schemes, using, in addition to gifts from those whom he can interest, the entire income gained from his books and lectures. He keeps nothing for himself but the small salary as mission doctor to pay actual living expenses. All of the industrial enterprises—coöperative stores, sawmills, reindeer, fox-farms, are deeded to the Deep-Sea Mission, and become its property as soon as they begin to be profitable.

Would you like to spend a day with Dr. Grenfell in summer, when he cruises about in his hospital-ship three or four thousand miles back and forth, from St. John’s all along the Labrador coast? You would see what a wonderful pilot the doctor is as he faces the perils of hidden reefs, icebergs, fogs, and storms. You would see that he can doctor his ship, should it leak or the propeller go lame, as well as the numbers of people who come to him with every sort of ill from aching teeth to broken bones.

Perhaps, though, you might prefer a fine, crisp day in winter. Then you could drive forty or fifty miles in the komatik, getting off to run when you feel a bit stiff with the cold, especially if it happens to be uphill. You might be tempted to coast down the hills, but you find that dogs can’t stand that any more than horses could, so you let down the “drug” (a piece of iron chain) to block the runners. There is no sound except the lone twitter of a venturesome tomtit who decided to risk the winter in a particularly thick spruce-tree. Sometimes you go bumpity-bump over fallen trees, with pitfalls between lightly covered with snow. Sometimes the dogs bound ahead eagerly over smooth ground where the only signs of the times are the occasional tracks of a rabbit, partridge, fox, or caribou. Then how you will enjoy the dinner of hot toasted pork cakes before the open fire, after the excitement of feeding the ravenous dogs with huge pieces of frozen seal-meat and seeing them burrow down under the snow for their night’s sleep. If there is no pressing need of his services next morning, the doctor may take you skeeing, or show you how to catch trout through a hole in the ice.

Winter or summer, perhaps you might come to agree with Dr. Grenfell that one may have “a jolly good time” while doing a man’s work in rough, out-of-the-way Labrador. You would, at any rate, have a chance to discover that life may be a splendid adventure.

THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL: CAPTAIN SCOTT

One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson.

WE know of many heroes—heroes of long ago, whose shining deeds make the past bright; and heroes of to-day, whose courage in the face of danger and hardship and whose faithful service for others make the times in which we live truly the best times of all. But should you ask me who of all this mighty company of the brave was the bravest, I should answer, Captain Scott. Some one has called his story, “The Undying Story of Captain Scott.” Would you like to hear it, and know for yourself why it is that as long as true men live this is a story that cannot die?

Most people who work know what they are working for; most men who are fighting for a cause know where they give their strength and their lives. The explorer alone has to go forward in the dark. He does not know what he will find. Only he hears within his heart the still whisper: “Something hidden. Go and find it.” And he believes that there is no far place of the earth that does not hold some truth, something that will help us learn the secrets of life and explain much that puzzles us in the world to-day.

When the explorer has once begun to think and wonder about the great unseen, unknown countries, where man has never journeyed, the whisper comes again and again: “Something hidden. Go and find it.”

People sometimes say to the explorer, “There is no sense of going to those strange lands where you cannot live. No good nor gold ever yet came from No-Man’s Land.”

But the men who went into the jungles of darkest Africa said, “As long as there is something hidden we must go to find it.” And the men who went into the still, white, frozen lands of the North said: “There is no truth that can stay untouched. When we know the secrets of the North and the South, we shall the better understand the East and the West.”

The whisper, “Something hidden,” came to Robert Falcon Scott when he was a little boy in Devonshire, England. Con, as he was called, never tired of hearing the tales of Sir Walter Raleigh, and of Sir Francis Drake, who sailed the seas and found a new world for England and sent his drum back to Devon where it was hung on the old sea-wall to show that the great days of the past would surely live again.

“You must take my drum” (Drake said),
“To the old sea-wall at home,
And if ever you strike that drum,” he said,
“Why, strike me blind, I’ll come!

“If England needs me, dead
Or living, I’ll rise that day!
I’ll rise from the darkness under the sea
Ten thousand miles away!”

The Devonshire men were sure that the brave spirit of Drake would come back in some true English heart whenever the time of need came. They even whispered when they told how Nelson won his great victory at Trafalgar,

“It was the spirit of Sir Francis Drake.”

When Con heard these tales, and the stories of his own father and uncles who were captains in England’s navy, he knew it was true that the spirit of a brave man does not die.

Sometimes when he was thinking of these things and wondering about the “something hidden” that the future had in store for him, his father would have to call him three or four times before he could wake him from his dream. “Old Mooney,” his father called him then, and he shook his head.

“Remember, son,” he would say, “an hour of doing is better than a life of dreaming. You must wake up and stir about in this world, and prove that you have it in you to be a man.”

How do you think that the delicate boy, with the narrow chest and the dreamy blue eyes, whom his father called “Old Mooney,” grew into the wide-awake, practical lad who became, a few years later, captain of the naval cadets on the training ship Britannia?

“I must learn to command this idle, dreamy ‘Old Mooney’ before I can ever command a ship,” he said to himself. So he gave himself orders in earnest.

When he wanted to lie in bed an extra half hour, it was, “Up, sir! ‘Up and doing,’ is the word!” And out he would jump with a laugh and a cheer for the new day.

When he felt like hugging the fire with a book on his knees he would say, “Out, sir! Get out in the open air and show what you’re made of!” Then he would race for an hour or two with his dog, a big Dane, over the downs, to come back in a glow ready for anything. And so the man who was to command others became master of himself. There came a time when a strong, brave man was needed to take command of the ship Discovery, that was to sail over unexplored seas to the South Pole. And Robert Falcon Scott, then a lieutenant in the royal navy, who had long dreamed of going forth where ships and men had never been and find the “something hidden” in strange far-off lands, found his dream had come true. He was put in command of that ship.

Three years were spent in that terrible land where

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled—

in the fierce winds that swept over those great death-white wastes.

After this time of hardship and plucky endurance it was hard to have to return without having reached the South Pole. But he came back with so much of deepest interest and value to report about the unknown country, that those who had given their money to provide for the expedition said: “The voyage has really been a success. Captain Scott must go again under better conditions with the best help and equipment possible.”

It was some time, however, before Captain Scott could be spared to go on that second and last voyage to the South Pole. This man who knew all about commanding ships and men was needed to help with the great battleships of the navy. Five years had passed before plans were ready for the greatest voyage of all.

When it was known that Captain Scott was to set out on another expedition, eight thousand men volunteered to go as members of the party. It was splendid to think how much real interest there was in the work and to know how much true bravery and fine spirit of adventure there is in the men of our every-day world, but it was hard to choose wisely out of so many the sixty men to make up the party.

They needed, of course, officers of the navy, besides Captain Scott, to help plan and direct, a crew of able seamen, firemen, and stokers to

run the ship, and doctors and stewards to take care of the men. Besides these, they wanted men of science who would be able to investigate in the right way the plants, animals, rocks, ice, ocean currents, and winds of that strange part of the earth; and an artist able to draw and to take the best kind of photographs and moving pictures.

The ship chosen for this voyage was the Terra Nova, the largest and strongest whaler that could be found. Whalers are ships used in whale-fishing, which are built expressly to make their way through the floating ice of Arctic seas.

The Terra Nova was a stout steamer carrying full sail, so that the winds might help in sending her on her way, thus saving coal whenever possible. The great difficulty was, of course, the carrying of sufficient supplies for a long time and for many needs.

With great care each smallest detail was worked out. There were three motor sledges, nineteen ponies, and thirty-three dogs to transport supplies. There was material for putting up huts and tents. There were sacks of coal, great cans of oil and petrol (gasoline); and tons of boxes of provisions, such as pemmican, biscuit, butter, sugar, chocolate—things that would not spoil and which would best keep men strong and warm while working hard in a cold country. There were fur coats, fur sleeping bags, snow shoes, tools of all sorts, precious instruments, books, and many other things, each of which was carefully considered for they were going where no further supplies of any sort were to be had.

On June 15, 1910, the Terra Nova sailed from Wales, and on November 26 left New Zealand for the great adventure.

If the men had been superstitious they would have been sure that a troublous time was ahead, for almost immediately a terrible storm broke. Great waves swept over the decks, the men had to work with buckets and pumps to bale out the engine room, while boxes and cases went bumping about on the tossing ship, endangering the lives of men and animals, and adding to the noise and terror of the blinding, roaring tempest.

But through it all the men never lost their spirits. Scott led in the singing of chanties, as they worked hour after hour to save the ship and its precious cargo.

At last they came out on a calm sea where the sun shone on blue waves dotted here and there with giant ice-bergs, like great floating palaces, agleam with magic light and color, beautiful outposts of the icy world they were about to enter.

You know that the seasons in the South Arctic regions are exactly opposite to ours. Christmas comes in the middle of their summer—the time of the long day when the sun never drops below the horizon. Their winter, when they get no sunlight for months, comes during the time we are having spring and summer.

It was Scott’s plan to sail as far as the ship could go during the time of light, build a comfortable hut for winter quarters, then go ahead with sledges and carry loads of provisions, leaving them in depots along the path of their journey south, which was to begin with the coming of the next long day.

Patient watchfulness, not only by the man in the crow’s nest, but on the part of all hands, was needed to guide the ship through the great masses of ice that pressed closer and closer about, as if they longed to seize and keep it forever in their freezing hold.

At last in January they came within sight of Mt. Terror, a volcano on Ross Island, which marked the place where they must land. It was strange and terrible, but most beautiful, to see the fire rise from that snowy mountain in the great white world they had come to explore. The ship could go no farther south because there stretched away from the shore of the island the great Ice Barrier, an enormous ice cap rising above the sea fifty or sixty feet and extending for 150,000 square miles.

Scott came, you remember, knowing well what lay before him. To reach the South Pole he must travel from his winter camp on Ross Island, 424 miles over the barrier, climb 125 miles over a monster glacier, and then push his way over 353 more miles of rough ice on a lofty, wind-swept plain. The whole journey southward and back to the winter hut covered about 1,850 miles.

As they could not count at most on more than 150 days in the year when marching would be possible, this meant that they must make over ten miles a day during the time of daylight. Scott knew how hard this must be in that land of fierce winds and sudden blizzards, when the blinding, drifting snow made all marching out of the question. But there was nothing of the dreamer about him now; he carefully worked out his plans and prepared for every emergency.

After finding a good place to land and build the hut for the winter camp where it would be sheltered from the worst winds, they spent eight days unloading the ship, which then sailed away along the edge of the barrier with a part of the men, to find out how things were to the east of them.

Captain Scott and his men had an exciting time, I can tell you, carrying their heavy boxes and packing cases across the ice to the beach. Great killer whales, twenty feet long, came booming along under them, striking the ice with their backs, making it rock dizzily and split into wide cracks, over which the men had to jump to save their lives and their precious stores.

While part of the company was building the hut and making it comfortable for the long dark winter, Captain Scott and a group of picked men began the work of going ahead and planting stores at depots along the way south. They would place fuel and boxes of food under canvas cover, well planted to secure it against the wind, and mark the spot by a high cairn, or mound, made of blocks of ice. This mound was topped with upright skis or dark packing boxes, which could be seen as black specks miles away in that white world. At intervals along the trail they would erect other cairns to mark the way over the desert of snow. Then back they went to the hut and the winter of waiting before the march.

How do you suppose they spent the long weeks of darkness? Why, they had a wonderful time! Each man was studying with all his might about the many strange things he had found in that land.

Wilson, who was Scott’s best friend, gave illustrated lectures about the water birds he had found near there, the clumsy penguins who came tottering up right in the face of his camera as if they were anxious to have their pictures taken. He had pictures, too, of their nests and their funny, floundering babies. There were also pictures of seals peeping up at him out of their breathing-holes in the ice, where he had gone fishing and had caught all sorts of curious sea creatures.

Other men were examining pieces of rock and telling the story which they told of the history of the earth ages and ages ago when the land of that Polar world was joined with the continents of Africa and South America. Evans gave lectures on surveying, and Scott told about the experiences of his earlier voyage and explained the use of his delicate instruments.

Of course they took short exploring trips about, and sometimes when the moon was up, or, perhaps, in the scant twilight of midday, they played a game of football in the snow.

At last the sun returned, and the time came for the great journey about the first of November, just a year after they had left New Zealand.

They had not gone far when it was proved that the motor sledges were useless, as the engines were not fitted for working in such intense cold. So, sorrowfully they had to leave them behind, and make ponies and dogs do all the work of hauling.

Then began a time of storms when blizzard followed blizzard. It seemed that they had met the wild spirit of all tempests in his snowy fastness, and as if he were striving to prove that the will of the strongest man must give way before the savage force of wind and weather. But there was something in the soul of these men that could not be conquered by any hardship—something that would never give up.

“The soul of a true man is stronger than anything that can happen to him,” said Captain Scott.

It seemed as if this journey was made to prove that. And it did prove it.

Misfortune followed misfortune. The sturdy ponies could not stand the dangers. Some of them slipped and fell into deep chasms in the ice; others suffered so that the only kind thing was to put them out of their pain. The men went along then up the fearful climb across the glacier, with just the help of the dogs who pulled the sledges carrying provisions. One of the men became very ill, which delayed them further. And ever the dreadful wind raged about them.

They reached a point about 170 miles from the Pole on New Year’s day. Here Scott decided to send two members of his party back with the sick man and the dog sledge. They were, of course, disappointed, but realized it was for the best.

After leaving part of their provisions in a new depot to feed them on the way back, Captain Scott and four men, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, and Evans, went on the last march to the Pole with lighter loads which they dragged on a hand sledge. This is what Scott wrote in the letter sent back by his men:

“A last note from a hopeful position. I think it’s going to be all right. We have a fine party going forward and all arrangements are going well.”