"WHISKY EGGS."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 41, 25 March 1914, Page 5

"WHISKY EGGS."

TALES OF A CANADIAN "SKY-PILOT."

"■The breaking-strain comes in a month. Then they go into the town and blow their stake, hitting the high spots and getting tanked up. . , ." ..•: The interviewer —a:*'' Daily News" representative—flew--, signals of distress and a paraphrase was conceded. "What I mean," explained speaker, Mr J. M. M'Cormick, the head of the:, little army of missionaries working under the Navy Mission in Canada, "is that to a man in camp drawing good money the temptation to go off to the nearest town and simply let himself go is tremendous. (We hav'& enormous odds against,, us in the work we are trying to dojfbut, man, it's great work!" GREAT WORK ON THE FRONTIERS "The whole manhood of Canada is being made out there on the frontiers, away from anyone who sees or anyone who cares, except, maybe, a wife or a mother or a sweetheart away in the homeland, waiting for the man pushing the steel road out on to the prairie and laying up the capital that will set him up in his farm and bring his folk out to him across the Atlantic.

Mr M'Cormick is no ordinary talker. The life he leads has got a big grip of him, and he sweeps through the stuffy respectability of a London office with a fierce biast of elemental life from a Western" mining camp. ' In England the navvy is ''the bloke what lives rough so as other people can live smooth.'' In Canada he is the man that faces death and disease and mutilation every day to build the lines that pay the investor's dividends. 1 And Mr M'Cormick has come home for just a little share of those v say, ten thousand pounds—to setfd out another dozen missionaries and a fpw"' hospitals and a score or so of libraries and schools and meeting-rhalls to the men who have left civilisation behind, them at the rail-head. WHERE THERE ARE NO FRILLS ■ ON RELIGION.

"Not that these men are the scum of humanity," he warns you*. "Don't get thinking that. They're magnificent men, the men who are going to be the backbone of Canada. These men don't v stay navvies. They work there till they can save capital to stock the 160 acres that the Government gives free to me who show proof that they can work it."

In camp, the sky-pilot, with his fiddle or gramophone ("canned music" in camp parlance) is no unweleome visitor, provided he can take,off his coat and show his grit by taking his turn at navvy's work. Religion, like everything else, has no frills in' the : West. You get .back to the elemental things—sin, and God, and prayer. "What about elrink?" Mr M'Cormick was asked as he spoke of the odds the missionary had to face. "Drink absolutely prohibited,*' he replied. "That doesn't mean, that it doesn't come in. I have seen it come in in coffins, in r dynamite kegs, sewn up inside dead pigs, and hidden in casks of butter.

"I remember a crate of eggs arriving once. Every egg had been blown hollow and filled witbf whisky and sealed up. Those eggs sold at a dollar a-piece. THE TWO-COMPARTMENT LIQUOR CORSET. "One man I knew had a pair of hollow steel corsets made, and worethem under a big coat. They were divided into two compartments, and he sold port win« out of otie side and whisky out of the other. The liquor went "in through a little r hole at his neck and came out of a tap through a waistcoat button-hole." It is a great work, in truth, among the men who "live rough," and —--as Mr M'Cormick did not add—it takes great men to do it.