Dr. Grenfell's Parish Part 11

"They _are_," she laughed. "They use them for ornaments. But _that_ doesn't matter. It makes them happy just to look at them."

We all laughed.

"And yet," she continued, "they _do_ play with them, sometimes, after all. There is a little girl up the bay who _has kissed the paint off her dolly_!"

Thus and all the time, in storm and suns.h.i.+ne, summer and winter weather, Grenfell of the Deep-sea Mission goes about doing good; if it's not in a boat, it's in a dog-sled. He is what he likes to call "a Christian man." But he is also a hero--at once the bravest and the most beneficently useful man I know. If he regrets his isolation, if the hards.h.i.+p of the life sometimes oppresses him, no man knows it. He does much, but there is much more to do. If the good people of the world would but give a little more of what they have so abundantly--and if they could but know the need, they would surely do that--joy might be multiplied on that coast; nor would any man be wronged by misguided charity.

"What a man does for the love of G.o.d," the doctor once said, "he does differently."