“We’ll patch you up and make you as well as ever in a little while,” assured the Doctor after a thorough examination, for this proved to be a curable case.

“That’ll be fine, sir.”

Medicine was provided, with directions for taking, and, as the Doctor had promised, and as he later learned, the man soon recovered his health and returned to his fishing.

The Albert sailed north.  Into every little harbor and settlement she dropped her anchor for a visit.  She called at the trading posts of the old Hudson’s Bay Company at Cartwright, Rigolet and Davis Inlet and the Moravian Missions among the Eskimos in the North.  She was welcomed everywhere, and everywhere Doctor Grenfell found so many sick or injured people that the whole summer long he was kept constantly busy.

The waters of this coast were unknown to him.  He knew nothing of their tides or reefs or currents.  But with confidence in himself and a courage that was well-nigh reckless, he sought out the people of every little harbor that he might give them the help that he had come to give.  If there was too great a hazard for the schooner, he used a whale-boat.  Once this whale-boat was blown out to sea, once it was driven upon the rocks, once it capsized with all on board, and before the summer ended it became a complete wreck.

Nine hundred cases were treated, some trivial though perhaps painful enough maladies, others most serious or even hopeless.  Here was a tooth to be extracted, there a limb to be amputated,—­cases of all kinds and descriptions, with never a doctor to whom the people could turn for relief until Doctor Grenfell providentially appeared.

With all the work, the voyage was one of pleasure.  Not only the pleasure of making others happier,—­the greatest pleasure any one can know,—­but it was a rattling fine adventure finding the way among islands that had never appeared on any map and were still unnamed.  It was fine fun, too, cruising deep and magnificent fjords past lofty towering cliffs, and exploring new channels.  And there were the Eskimos and their great wolfish dogs, and their primitive manner of living and dressing.  It was all interesting and fascinating.

Never, however, since that August night in Domino Run, had the little mud hut, the dying man, the grief-stricken, miserable mother, and the neglected and starving little ones been out of Doctor Grenfell’s thoughts, and often enough his big heart had ached for the stricken ones.  He had never before witnessed such awful depths of poverty.

In other harbors that he had visited in his northern voyage similar heartrending cases had, to be sure, fallen under his attention.  In one harbor he found a poor Eskimo both of whose hands had been blown off by the premature discharge of a gun.  For days and days the man had endured indescribable agony.  Nothing had been done for him, save to bathe the stubs of his shattered arms in cold water, until Doctor Grenfell appeared, for there was no surgeon to call upon to relieve the sufferer.