Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Young Knights of the Empire

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light up a flare, which would catch the attention of anyone on shore, so he frayed out a piece of rope and smeared it with the fat of the dead dogs, and was about to light it when he found that his matches had got wet, and in that damp air he could not get them dry. I wonder whether he thought of the Scout's dodge of drying them in his hair for a minute or two? [Illustration: Dr. Grenfell as he appeared on the ice-floe, with a cloak of dog-skins, and puttees made of flannel taken from a dog's traces. He used his shirt for a flag, and made a flagstaff of frozen dogs' legs.] In order to keep warm he used one of the dead dogs as a seat, with the other dogs hugged close round him for warmth. His feet being in thin moccasins, which easily got wet through, were freezing with cold till he thought of an idea for keeping them warm. He had seen the Laplanders put a lot of grass into their boots before pulling them on, and then filling up the legs with as much more grass as they could cram in. There was not much grass growing on his ice-floe, so Grenfell had to invent something to use in place of it; he cut from the dogs' traces some flannel with which they were lined to prevent chafing, and with this he stuffed the moccasins, and so made them warmer, and then bound the remainder round his knees as puttees. In this way he got sufficient warmth to enable him to sleep. Towards morning he awoke with the idea that he must make something in the way of a flag to attract the notice of people on shore, and to show them that there was someone in distress on the ice. The question was, how to make a flagstaff? I wonder whether a Boy Scout could have seen a way? Grenfell took the frozen legs of the three dead dogs, and bound them together with strips of raw hide, and thus manufactured a staff, on to which he then tied his shirt to act as a flag. It worked very well till the sun rose, and then the legs began to melt a little, and the flagstaff became a very wobbly one; and, as the Doctor describes it, "almost tied itself into knots." Like a true Scout, Grenfell never despaired; he kept thinking out different ways by which he might survive the danger. He thought of setting light to some unravelled rope by using a piece of ice to act as a burning glass. In this way he hoped to attract the attention of the people on shore by a smoke signal; but, while he was busy preparing it, he saw the distant sparkle of what looked like an oar from a boat, presently he saw it again, and soon he could see the boat itself. His flag had been seen by the fishermen, and they pushed out in their boat through the frozen ice till they got him and his faithful dogs all safely aboard. One man had seen him the night before just as it was getting dark, and had spread the news down the coast, so that all the time, though he did not know it, anxious eyes were watching him. The only difficulty was to get a boat through the mass of broken ice-floes and drifting ice, which covered the heaving surface of the sea between him and the shore, but pluck and strong arms did it. In the end his rescuers brought him safely ashore, where every man, woman and child in the settlement was on the beach to welcome him with cheers and--many of them--with tears of joy. Doctor Grenfell says that during the whole of this terrible experience he did not once feel fear. He felt that he would probably lie down and sleep his last sleep on that ice-floe; the thought did not disturb him very much. At the same time, he did feel something of that regret which comes to all people when dying, and that was the remembrance of how much time he had wasted (even he!) when he had life and opportunities for doing good for other people, and how he had let his opportunities slide by without doing so much as he might have done. So keep on doing good turns every minute whenever you can get a chance of doing them, and then when you are face to face with death, you will be able to say: "Well, I did my best to do my duty. I did not waste much time on other things," * * * * * A PLUCKY BOY SCOUT. It is not always in the field of action that Scouts can show their heroism; sometimes it is at home or in their private life, where their

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