Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank   That's staked out nigh three hundred claims and every one a blank   That's followed every fool stampede and seen the rise and fall   Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all   That's prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a song   To see it yield a fortune to some fool that came along   That's sunk a dozen bed-rock holes and not a speck in sight   Yet sees them take a million from the claims to left and right   Now aren't things like that enough to drive a man to booze   But Hard-Luck Smith was hoodoo-proof he knew the way to lose      Twas in the fall of nineteen four leap-year I've heard them say   When Hard-Luck came to Hunker Creek and took a hillside lay   And lo! as if to make amends for all the futile past   Late in the year he struck it rich the real pay-streak at last   The riffles of his sluicing-box were choked with speckled earth   And night and day he worked that lay for all that he was worth   And when in chill December's gloom his lucky lease expired   He found that he had made a stake as big as he desired      One day while meditating on the waywardness of fate   He felt the ache of lonely man to find a fitting mate   A petticoated pard to cheer his solitary life   A woman with soft soothing ways a confidant a wife   And while he cooked his supper on his little Yukon stove   He wished that he had staked a claim in Love's rich treasure-trove   When suddenly he paused and held aloft a Yukon egg   For there in pencilled letters was the magic name of Peg      You know these Yukon eggs of ours some pink some green some blue   A dollar per assorted tints assorted flavors too   The supercilious cheechako might designate them high   But one acquires a taste for them and likes them by and by   Well Hard-Luck Henry took this egg and held it to the light   And there was more faint pencilling that sorely taxed his sight   At last he made it out and then the legend ran like this   Will Klondike miner write to Peg Plumhollow Squashville Wis      That night he got to thinking of this far-off unknown fair   It seemed so sort of opportune an answer to his prayer   She flitted sweetly through his dreams she haunted him by day   She smiled through clouds of nicotine she cheered his weary way   At last he yielded to the spell his course of love he set   Wisconsin his objective point his object Margaret      With every mile of sea and land his longing grew and grew   He practised all his pretty words and these I fear were few   At last one frosty evening with a cold chill down his spine   He found himself before her house the threshold of the shrine   His courage flickered to a spark then glowed with sudden flame   He knocked he heard a welcome word she came his goddess came   Oh she was fair as any flower and huskily he spoke   I'm all the way from Klondike with a mighty heavy poke   I'm looking for a lassie one whose Christian name is Peg   Who sought a Klondike miner and who wrote it on an egg      The lassie gazed at him a space her cheeks grew rosy red   She gazed at him with tear-bright eyes then tenderly she said   Yes lonely Klondike miner it is true my name is Peg   It's also true I longed for you and wrote it on an egg   My heart went out to someone in that land of night and cold   But oh I fear that Yukon egg must have been mighty old   I waited long I hoped and feared you should have come before   I've been a wedded woman now for eighteen months or more   I'm sorry since you've come so far you ain't the one that wins   But won't you take a step inside I'll let you see the twins