And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales.

This is your host, John Hagenorn.

And today, a story from one of my favorite authors,

Jack London.

The story?

The Banks of the Sacramento.

It was only a little boy, singing in a shrilled trouble the sea shanty which see men sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and break the anchors out for Frisco Port. It was only a little boy who had never seen the sea, but 200 feet beneath him rolled

to Sacramento.

Young Jerry, he was called, after old Jerry, his father, from whom he had learned the song, as well

as received his shock of bright red hair, his blue, dancing eyes, and his fair and inevitably freckled skin.

For old Jerry had been a sailor and had followed the sea till middle life,

haunted always by the words of the ringing shanty.

Then one day he had sung the song in earnest

in an eezyatic port swinging and thrilling round the capstan circle with 20 others.

And at San Francisco he turned his back upon his ship and upon the sea and went to behold with his own eyes the banks of the Sacramento

He beheld the gold to for he found employment at the Yellow Dream Mine, and proved of utmost usefulness

in rigging the great oar cables across the river and 200 feet above its surface.

After that he took charge of those cables and kept them in repair and ran them and loved

them and became himself an indispensable fixture of the Yellow Dream mine.

Then he loved Pretty Margaret Kelly, but she had left him and young Jerry, the latter barely

toddling to take up her last long sleep in the little graveyard among the great sober pines.

Old Jerry never went back to the sea.

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