"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting; It's luring me on as of old; Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold. It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace." The Spell of the Yukon. Or another verse: "I wanted the gold, and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it; I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it-- Came out with a fortune last fall-- Yet somehow life's not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn't all." The Spell of the Yukon. Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said, "All you can take in your cold, dead hand Is what you have given away." And how the warning against sin hurtles its way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power: "It grips you like some kinds of sinning; It twists you from foe to a friend; It seems it's been since the beginning; It seems it will be to the end." The Spell of the Yukon. Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you." Service says the same thing in "It grips you." GOD AND HEAVEN Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"? "I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring wings; It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the timeless things, And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings!" The Spell of the Yukon. This God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker: "Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond For us who are true to the trail; A vision to seek, a beckoning peak, A farness that never will fail; A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal, A manhood that irks at a bond, And try how we will, unattainable still, Behold it, our Land of Beyond!" Rhymes of a Rolling Stone. And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail: