Hello, friends. This is episode number 278 of the way I heard it. It's what we like to call

and occasionally the occasion in question is Halloween. And this year I thought I'd mark the

occasion by reciting one of my very favorite poems. This is not a poem that is traditionally associated with October 31st,

but it is a little creepy and well suited, I think, for the occasion at hand. It tells the story

of a gold prospector up in the Yukon territory whose partner makes him promise to cremate his last remains after he freezes to death,

which he is pretty sure is going to happen. Well, it does. And as you'll soon hear,

the prospector, who is also the narrator, is a man who takes his promises very seriously.

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, he says. And then one of my

favorite observations, a promise made is a debt unpaid. Those words, in fact, are the epigram in a book

I wrote a few years ago about this podcast, but that's neither here nor there.

The poem, as many of you know, is the cremation of Sam McGee.

It was written a long time ago in a very cold place by a bank teller named Robert Service,

who became widely known as the Bard of the Yukon.

Service was a modest man, very careful not to call his work

poetry. Verse, he said, not poetry, is what I write. Something the man in the street would take

notice of, and the sweet old lady might paste in her album. Something the schoolboy would spout,

and the fellow in the pub would quote, my work belongs to the simple folks whom I like to please.

And please them he did. Robert Service was one of the most commercially successful poets of

the last century, even though the critics absolutely hated his work. They called it doggerol. And the more

popular he became, the more his critics howled. Full disclosure, that's partly why I like him

so much. He wrote to please nobody but himself. I also like the way he wrote. In his autobiography,

Service described his method of writing at his tiny cabin in Dawson City like this.

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