In addition to her gold and copper, her furs and her fish, Alaska has produced a crop of writers of more or less importance. By far the truest exponent of the life of the country is Robert Service whose _The Spell of the Yukon_ surely breathes the spirit of the land. Service is now an army surgeon in the European war and his latest volume _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_ has added to the reputation he justly enjoys because of the verse which went before it. This little volume is dedicated to the memory of his brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, killed in action, and the _Foreword_ with which the collection opens is well worth quoting: "I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes In weary, woeful, waiting times; In doleful hours of battle din Ere yet they brought the wounded in! Through vigils by the fateful night, In lousy barns by candle light; In dug-outs, sagging and aflood, On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood; By ragged grove, by ruined road, By hearths accurst where Love abode; By broken altars, blackened shrines-- I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes! "I've solaced me with scraps of song The desolated ways along; Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown And meadows reaped by death alone; By blazing cross and splintered spire, By headless Virgin in the mire; By gardens gashed amid their bloom, By gutted grave, by shattered tomb; Beside the dying and the dead, Where rockets green and rockets red In trembling pools of poising light, With flowers of flame festoon the night. Ah me! By what dark ways of wrong I've cheered my heart with scraps of song! "So here's my sheaf of war-won verse, And some is bad, and some is worse. And if at times I curse a bit, You needn't read that part of it! For through it all, like horror, runs The red resentment of the guns! And you yourself would mutter when You took the things that once were men And sped them through that zone of hate To where the dripping surgeons wait! You'd wonder, too, if, in God's sight, War ever, _ever_ can be right!" Service is essentially a poet. His novel, _The Trail of Ninety-eight_, well,--we have forgiven him! It is lurid melodrama and certainly adds nothing to his literary reputation. But none can read _The Spell of the Yukon_ without breathing deeply! "There's a land where the mountains are nameless And the rivers all run God knows where! There are lives that are erring and aimless And deaths that just hang by a hair! There are hardships that nobody reckons, There are valleys unpeopled and still! There's a land--oh, it beckons and beckons! I want to go back--and I will!"