Down the Trail With Gum Packs
Ev’ry nugget clean and sound,
Red’s a jewel, smooth and round,
Worth a dollar’n ten a pound;
Here’s your gum, ye giddy girls,
Here’s your Maine spruce gum.
The chaps that went off with the Klondike diggers
For gold—jest gold,
Have slumped in the snow, and they work like niggers,
And they haven’t got rich, we’re told.
We’re snowshoeing down from the north of
Katahdin,
See here! Yum, yum!
Here’s a tole to tease Maud to come into the garden
—These rich, rosy lumps o’ spruce gum.
Our fires are dowsed in the lonesome old camps,
We’ve left them to wolves and the foxes and damps.
The trail of our snowshoes lies snakin’ behind,
For we’re clawing for home with the treasures we’ve mined.
We’ve no sort of use for the pick and the sluice;
Our Klondike has been the straight trunks of the spruce.
Let them that elect grub the dirt for a “gleam,”
Our ore is the gum and our lode is the seam
That doesn’t go sneaking in mire and clay,
But grins at the sun and drinks deep of broad day.
Go grope for your gold in the bowels of mud!
We’ll cleave our fresh nuggets of resinous blood
Forced out from the heart through the fibre and vein
Of the giants who lurk in the woodlands of Maine.
Just squint through this bubble and gaze at the blaze:
That red is the fire of hot summer days;
That glimmer is autumn; that glow is the tint
That was lent by some campfire’s guttering glint.
And here is a globe like the eye of a cat,
And this one is amber like honey; and that Is a tear rosy red with the anger and shame
Of a king glooming down as the axe-heavers came;
—Staring down as around him his kin roared to earth
Midst the oaths of the swampers and Labor’s rude mirth.
That tear of the spruce, may it go to the pearls
Flashing bright ’neath the lips of some sweetest of girls!
These, then, are the treasures we bring in our packs,
—Each round, rosy globule as sweet as the smacks
We’ll get from the kids when they swoop with a roar
At dad just the second he opens the door.
Clear out your old scraps, Mr. Druggist: we come
With a good hefty jag of the season’s new gum.
Ey’ry nugget clear and sound,
Red’s a jewel, smooth and round,
Worth a dollar’n ten a pound.
Here’s your gum, ye giddy girls,
Here’s your Maine spruce gum.