Robert Service, famous for his ballads of life in the Gold Rush years of the Yukon, among them The Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", painted pictures of artists, grisettes and models from the merry, tragic life of bohemian Paris of the early 1900s, inspired by the shadows of World War I as it fell across the city.
Throughout these poems are expressions of the poet's own homespun philosophy. His verses offered gaiety, humour, mostalgia and pathos while his comments on women, life and death, ambition, success and failure, were all aimed to evoke quick response in the readers heart."