Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows: "Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro, Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be the last to go. "Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand, Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?" The Spell of the Yukon. And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God: "But the stars throng out in their glory, And they sing of the God in man; They sing of the Mighty Master, Of the loom his fingers span, Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole, And weft in the wondrous plan. "Here by the camp-fire's flicker, Deep in my blanket curled, I long for the peace of the pine-gloom, Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled, And the wind and the wave are silent, And world is singing to world." The Spell of the Yukon. "Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer: "Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, See through the nice veneer the naked soul?" The Spell of the Yukon. and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"--the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs: "The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--." The Spell of the Yukon. SIN AND DEATH The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"