The Strangers' Gallery by Paul Bowdring Page A

introducing Dr. Legge.) A man, still seated, but with a loud, metallic voice—and a British accent, of all things—had beaten him to it. He was fascinated by the Genome Project, he said, and wanted to know if they had found the colour-blindness gene. Dr. Legge said no, that “mapping,” as he called it, had really just begun. Finding genetic flaws was a difficult task, and even after they did find a flawed gene, they would still be a long way from finding a cure for the disease that it caused.
    Though he was still on his feet, Miles was ignored by the chair for question number two in favour of a starry-eyed young student in genome heaven.
    â€œThat goddamn Murray,” I heard him say under his breath, and then I recognized Mr. Murdoch Murray of the Newfoundland Historical Society.
    She had just made a “career choice,” the student announced to Dr. Legge, who looked even younger than she did. He assured her that the field offered enormous opportunities and that she wouldn’t be disappointed in her decision.
    Miles had remained standing during this sweet fatherly exchange to make sure that he would be recognized by the chair next time. He was—and in more ways than one. I remembered that Mr. Murray had chaired the geology lecture last fall.
    Miles was surprisingly restrained and magnanimous, however. “Brendan Harnett here,” he began. “Mr. Murray…I have a few questions for Dr. Legge, Dr. Eu-
gene
Legge.”
    This elicited a few murmurs of laughter from the audience, and a benign smile from the doctor himself, whose name undoubtedly had been the object of levity on other occasions. Miles was not looking in his direction, however, but, smiling himself, looking directly at the chair.

    Chairman Murray had good reason for ignoring Miles. He knew, as I knew, that Miles wasn’t actually going to ask any questions. He was going to lecture Dr. Eu-
gene
with some answers—riding his historical (and sometimes hysterical) hobby horse on his usual exasperating roundabout route, down the highways and byways of what his spiritual mentor, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, in his “magisterial”
A
History of Newfoundland,
published exactly one hundred years ago,
he had informed me on the way here, had called the “strange, eventful history” of “this ill-used and down-trodden Colony.”
It was a history that was a classic example, Miles felt, of what Edward Gibbon had said about history in general. In
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
“the Great Gibbon,” as Miles always referred to him
—
I always picture a great ape intently focused on picking nits from the Great Head of History—had famously remarked that history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
    Yes, that about summed it all up for Miles, though he continued to do the daily Newfoundland register, to voice his indignation in the upper register, to take his place at the public grindstone: cataloguing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of this ill-used and down-trodden place; identifying the ill-users and the down-treaders; blowing the whistle; naming names. Prowse, of course, had been a great user of the public grindstone himself, but it might be said that all present-day users of “the public grinder” sank into insignificance compared with Miles.
    Though he would be the first to point out that Prowse’s book was called A
History of Newfoundland
and described by Prowse himself as “a very incomplete history,” it was certainly the version that Miles subscribed to. He had even created a Prowse Society to keep it alive, though “cell” rather than the more saccharine-sounding “society” might better describe it. Nothing made him madder than to see Prowse’s
History
disparagingly described by academic historians, professional historians,