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All told, Wullie Service sold better than 3,000,000 copies of his verse, later learned, to his disappointment, that the world's readers were far less interested in his fiction (six novels), or his advice on clean living, set forth in Why Not Grow Young?, a paean to raw cabbage and potatoes.
Villa in the Sun. In 1913 Service settled into an expatriate's life in France. The Service ballads, still selling a steady 20,000 books a year, financed the sybaritic life he led in Brittany, Nice, and in his ocher-faced Monte Carlo villa surveying the azure Mediterranean where Tennyson once slept. For four decades he soaked up the kindly sun. "I want every day of my life to belong to me, to do with as I please," he said.
And one day last week in the Brittany villa at Lancieux, death at last stilled his rhythmic tongue at 84. He had missed by 16 years his youthful ambition to live to 100, had fallen short of his goal of 1,000 poems. But he had left behind him an ineffaceable imprint of his adventurer's appetite for the wild far places and the wild far things, in imperishable rhymed memorials to Claw-Fingered Kitty, Chewed-Ear Jenkins and Dangerous Dan McGrew.