Dr. Grenfell's Parish - The Original Classic Edition

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Normal Duncan, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside Dr. Grenfell's Parish:

Past the Dead Islands, Snug Harbour, Domino Run, Devil's Lookout and the Quaker's Hat-beyond Johnny Paul's Rock and the Wolves, Sandwich Bay, Tumbledown Dick, Indian Harbour, and the White Cockade-past Cape Harrigan, the Farmyard Islands and the Hen and Chickens-far north to the great, craggy hills and strange peoples of Kikkertadsoak, Scoralik, Tunnulusoak, Nain, Okak, and, at last, to Cape Chidley itself-northward, every crooked mile of the way, bold headlands, low outlying islands, sunken reefs, tides, fogs, great winds and snow make hard sailing of it.

...But the Labrador voyage is inshore-a winding course among the islands, or a straight one from headland to headland, of a coast off which reefs lie thick: low-lying, jagged ledges, washed by the sea in heavy weather; barren hills, rising abruptly-and all isolated-from safe water; sunken rocks, disclosed, upon approach, only by the green swirl above them.

...In such a gale, forty vessels were driven on a lee shore; in another, eighty were wrecked overnight-two thousand fishermen cast away, the coast littered with splinters of ships-and, once (it is but an incident), a schooner was torn from her anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet above the high-water mark.

...Indeed, though he has joyously lived weeks of blue weather in the outports, with the sea all a-ripple and flashing and the breeze blowing warm, in retrospect land and people resolve themselves into a rocky harbour and a sturdy little lad with a question-the harbour, gray and dripping wet, a cluster of whitewashed cottages perched on the rocks, towards which a tiny, red-sailed punt is beating from the frothy open, with the white of breakers on either hand, while a raw wind lifts the fog from the black inland hills, upon which ragged patches of snow lie melting; the lad, stout, frank-eyed, tow-headed, browned by the wind, bending over the splitting-table with a knife in his toil-worn young hand and the blood of cod dripping from his fingers, and looking wistfully up, at last, to ask a question or two concerning certain old, disquieting mysteries.

...But they seem not to know that fishing is a hard or dangerous employment: for instance, a mild-eyed, crooked old fellow-he was a cheerful Methodist, too, and subject to "glory-fits"-who had fished from one harbour for sixty years, computed for me that he had put out to sea in his punt at least twenty thousand times, that he had been frozen to the seat of his punt many times, that he had been swept to sea with the ice-packs, six times, that he had weathered six hundred gales, great and small, and that he had been wrecked more times than he could "just mind" at the moment; yet he was the only old man ever I met who seemed honestly to wish that he might live his life over again!