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84 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.

No! There's the land. (Have you seen it?)
 * It's the cussedest land that I know,

From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
 * To the deep, deathlike valley below.

Some say God was tired when He made it;
 * Some say it's a fine land to shun;

Maybe; but there's some as would trade it
 * For no land on earth—and I'm one.

In his "Ballads of a Cheechako" he again is spokesman for the prosecutor and presents his song of the gold hunt in those vigorous lines of "The Trail of '98," which begin: