Plainfield High School - Milestone Yearbook (Plainfield, NJ)

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16 Gi OA Gis on the point of setting out, dog-train before the door and driver merrily cracking his whip, when an urgent summons was brought him to attend a small boy who had broken his thigh. “Johnnie’s” sufferings relieved and his injured limb plastered in a plaster cast, the doctor hurried forward to his first patient. As they were hastening past a wretched little hut in the wilder- ness of snow, the Doctor was again hailed and asked to look into the con- dition of a poor little orphan girl, half dead from starvation. He found the child wrapped in rags and laid on the floor of the shanty, a pitiful spectacle. The little one was ministered to and the Doctor set out for the third time, finally reaching his destination in spite of delays and appeals. Such is the life of Dr. Grenfell. And does he regret the other life in the outside world which he has given up? Does he realize how great is the work he is doing? Perhaps he best answers himself. “I am no martyr,” he exclaimed impatiently to a friend who put to him a like question. Indeed no. He is a healthy, hearty, humorous man, eager to get out of life all there may be in it for him, rejoicing boyishly in the risk and the danger, glad of his freedom, always merry and brave, cheerful and strong. His ideal of existence seems to be expressed in the words he so often uses: “The great joys of this life are its opportunities for service.” VALEDICTORY ESSAY THE PRIOMPHS ORWOU LE: GERTRUDE LAURA HUNTER. HERE is one respect in which the aging world and the aging individual are alike. With each the limit of usefulness advances as each in- creases in years. The boy who at ten considered the man of forty as ready for the chimney-corner and Taylor’s “Holy Dying,’ himself at forty is carrying a banner of red or orange or blue to football matches, and is splitting his throat over valorous deeds on the diamond or gridiron. So it is with the world. Part of it elected a “young” man of forty-three to the presidency a year or so ago, and insistently spoke of his youth in connection with such a position of trust. Over a century ago, however, William Pitt, a man twenty years his junior, was managing the office of chancellor of the exchequer, becoming premier of England at twenty-three. We are in the habit of referring to Alphonso as “the little king of Spain,’ imagining him with the curls and the broad white collar of infancy. It would be safe to say, however, that when the world was younger, nobody regarded the eighteen year old Alexander as “‘the little prince of Macedon.” Whatever the world may regard as the limit of youthfulness, however,

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THE ORACLE 15 Chidley, stopping at the various missionary stations, the three hospitals and the Orphan Asylum, and answers calls from all quarters. No weather is rough enough, no gale too strong to keep the “Strathcona” in harbor when a call comes for help. Seas that appall the staunchest of the Labrador fisher- men, tempests that fairly lift the ships from their anchorage—nothing is too formidable for this daring missionary. By the natives he has long been regarded with tolerant amusement as a gentle lunatic, whom Providence preserves miraculously from destruction. Mr. Norman Duncan, who visited him on board his little vessel during a most perilous trip says: “Doubtless he enjoyed the experience while it lasted—and promptly forgot it as being common-place. I have heard of him caught at night in a winter’s gale of wind and sleet, threading a tumultuous, reef strewn sea, his skipper at the wheel, himself on the bowsprit, guiding the ship by the flash and roar of breakers while the sea tumbled over him.” Mr. Duncan says of a friend who was with Dr. Grenfell on this trip: “If the chance passenger who told me the story, is to be believed, upon that trying occasion the Doctor had ‘the time of his life.’ “All that man wanted, I told the Doctor, was, as he said, ‘to bore a hole in the bottom of the ship and crawl out.’ “Why, exclaimed the Doctor with a laugh of surprise, ‘he wasn't frightened, was he?’ ” The “Strathcona” is the fifth boat which Dr. Grenfell has had since he began his work on the Labrador. All the others have succumbed to hard usage on “the worst coast in the world.” The Doctor’s disregard of storm and surf has given rise to a new proverb among the fishermen. When the wind blows an exceptionally stiff gale and the sea looks particularly hostile, they say, “This will bring Grenfell.” And it usually does. All through the long, desolate winter Dr. Grenfell makes his untiring trips on his sledge, the “Lend-a-Hand.” Drawn by a dog-team, over ice and snow, in bitter cold, he never hesitates for an instant to start out whenever he is called upon. In a letter written to a contemporary periodical, he says: “We have already been over six hundred miles with the dogs. I hada long trip to a place seventy miles away to set a broken arm. Fortunately, or, I may say, unfortunately, I had forty other patients along the route. Thus, on my second southern trip to a place about sixty miles distant, to fetch a person back for operation, we were away thirteen days and saw seventy sick folk.” In another article he tells most graphically of a typical trip which he made during the winter. Called to the bedside of a dying priest many miles away, he prepared to start immediate ly on his long journey. He was just

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THE ORACLE. 17 there have been prodigies and triumphs of youth in every age. The roll-call of youth in the days before the term included almost all ages under the allotted three-score-and-ten was a remarkable one. Its names were splendid and inspiring, from David the shepherd boy, who began his history as king at eighteen, to Chatterton, the poet, finishing his tragic chronicle at the same age; from Alexander of Macedon, ruler of all the eastern world before he was thirty-three, to James Watts, the Scotch peasant boy of eighteen, who made possible our wonderful steam engine; from Napoleon, sweeping western Europe at twenty-seven, to Raphael, finishing his deathless work at thirty-seven; from Charlemagne, master of a nation at thirty, to Shelley, master of poetry at twenty-one. So the list runs, emphasizing more particularly warriors, statesmen, and poets, the most prominent of whom established their right to the name of great before the age of twenty-five, and many of them when not yet out of their teens. The stories of the world’s famous warrior-youths are especially inter- esting. Possibly the most picturesque of all is that of David, the shepherd boy who came down from the hills of Judea, where he had tended the flock and watched the courses of the stars, to become champion of his people against their Philistine enemy, Goliath. “A youth, and ruddy and of a fair countenance,” he was, yet “he prevailed over the Philistine—and slew him.” A story of wonderful power is that of Alexander, world conqueror. It seems almost impossible to account for the boy who pressed from victory to victory throughout the known world, who subjected kings and nations to his will, who knew nothing but triumph and the lust of triumph all his life, and who at last sighed for more worlds to conquer. Not only has the military world produced youthful leaders, but political circles also have exhibited precocious geniuses. English history has given us William Pitt, the second Earl of Chatham, whose useful genius dis- played itself with an almost unnatural precocity, and whose influence was greater than that of his king before his twenty-fifth year. By the side of Pitt we may place his rival, the celebrated Charles James Fox, whose talents were developed so early that he was elected to Parliament when not yet twenty, and who at twenty-one was a lord of the admiralty and a sharp thorn in George III’s side. Our own America has produced such statesmen as Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, who, while still comparatively young, helped to win for their country the independence which she has since been cherishing. Then, too, there are prodigies of youth in the literary world—men who gave to the world some of the finest works in literature before the age of