In the North

A yacht was backing away from her wharf in Sydney, Nova Scotia, early one morning last week. Suddenly her superstructure, just forward of her one funnel, shook and belched with the flames of a violent explosion. An engineer staggered on deck, his face broiled, clothes hanging in sooty tatters. The fire, racing aft, drove two half-dressed women out of their cabin. They were badly roasted stumbling to the wharf. A man with a dory rescued the captain's young son from where he was marooned on the burning quarterdeck.

Two boatfuls of British tars from H.M.S. Heliotrope, which lay near, proposed towing the burning vessel into deep water and sinking her. But the Sydney fire department arrived in time to flood the hold, prevent a further explosion.

Any burning yacht is a sorry sight. The scene in Sydney was doubly sorry because the yacht was the Marabel, a pleasure craft which had just been remodeled as a hospital ship and given by Miss Susan Dwight Bliss of Manhattan to the hospital at Indian Harbor, Labrador, a unit of Dr. Wilfred Thomason Grenfells famed and farflung medical missions. The Marabel was laden with winter supplies for hard-working doctor- preachers. The women burned were Grenfell volunteers, the Misses Harriot Houghteling of Chicago, Ill., and Margaret Pierce of Haverford, Pa.

It is 35 years since Dr. Grenfell, a Marlborough-and-Oxford youth who had amplified his medical interneship by cruising the North Sea healing fishermen struck across the Atlantic to take his surgery to the white fishermen and Eskimos of Labrador. He built hospitals, co-operative stores and native industries in many a cove and inlet of that grisly coast. The Indian Harbor Hospital, founded in 1894, is about 200 miles north of Battle Harbor, where Dr. Grenfell began his work two years earlier. The Marabel was to have assisted, from the Indian Harbor base, the coastwise dispensary service long rendered by the Battle Harbor hospital ship, Strathcona.

Dr. Grenfell has been called "the Knight Errant of the North" and two generations of U. S. school and college men, among whom he visits often to enlist funds and volunteers, have marveled at his adventures with ship and dog-sledge.

Six weeks ago, at the ceremonious opening of a $120,000 mission hospital at St. Anthony, on the uppermost tip of Newfoundland, Sir William Allardyce, Governor of Newfoundland and Laborador, acting on instructions from his King, smote Dr. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell on the right shoulder with a sword and bade "the Knight Errant of the North" arise a Knight of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.