Through it all a single ray of hope shone.  The faith that Egede had preached all those years, and the life he had lived with them, bore their fruit.  They had struck deeper than he thought.  They crowded to him, all that could, as their one friend.  Dying mothers held their suckling babes up to him and died content.  In a deserted island camp a half-grown girl was found alone with three little children.  Their father was dead.  When he knew that for him and the baby there was no help, he went to a cave and, covering himself and the child with skins, lay down to die.  His parting words to his daughter were, “Before you have eaten the two seals and the fish I have laid away for you, Pelesse will come, no doubt, and take you home.  For he loves you and will take care of you.”  At the mission every nook and cranny was filled with the sick and the dying.  Egede and his wife nursed them day and night.  Childlike, when death approached, they tried to put on their best clothes, or even to have new ones made, that they might please God by coming into His presence looking fine.  When Egede had closed their eyes, he carried the dead in his arms to the vestibule, where in the morning the men who dug the graves found them.  At the sight of his suffering the scoffers were dumb.  What his preaching had not done to win them over, his sorrows did.  They were at last one.

That dreadful year left Egede a broken man.  In his dark moments he reproached himself with having brought only misery to those he had come to help and serve.  One thorn which one would think he might have been spared rankled deep in it all.  Some missionaries of a dissenting sect—­Egede was Lutheran—­had come with the smallpox ship to set up an establishment of their own.  At their head was a man full of misdirected zeal and quite devoid of common-sense, who engaged Egede in a wordy dispute about justification by faith and condemned him and his work unsparingly.  He had grave doubts whether he was in truth a “converted man.”  It came to an end when they themselves fell ill, and Egede and his wife had the last word, after their own fashion.  They nursed the warlike brethren through their illness with loving ministrations and gave them back to life, let us hope, wiser and better men.

At Christmas, 1735, Egede’s faithful wife, Gertrude, closed her eyes.  She had gone out with him from home and kin to a hard and heathen land, and she had been his loyal helpmeet in all his trials.  Now it was all over.  That winter scurvy laid him upon a bed of pain and, lying there, his heart turned to the old home.  His son had come from Copenhagen to help, happily yet while his mother lived.  To him he would give over the work.  In Denmark he could do more for it than in Greenland, now he was alone.  On July 29, 1736, he preached for the last time to his people and baptized a little Eskimo to whom they gave his name, Hans.  The following week he sailed for home, carrying, as all his earthly wealth, his beloved dead and his motherless children.