"But the Bible does not compare the Christian's path as one of hard labor. But Solomon says wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness and her paths are peace. Under the word transgressor are included all those that disobey their maker, or, in shorter words, the ungodly. Every person looking around him will see many who are transgressors and whose lot is very hard.

"I remark secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of guilt his conscience smites him. The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to the beholder. Sometimes, however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but before long he returns to his worldly lusts. Oh, it is indeed hard for a sinner to go down into perhaps perdition over all the obstacles which God has placed in his path. But many, I am afraid, do go down into perdition, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in after it.

"Suppose now there was a fearful precipice and to allure you there your enemies should scatter flowers on its dreadful edge, would you if you knew that while you were strolling about on that awful rock that night would settle down on you and that you would fall from that giddy, giddy height, would you, I say, go near that dreadful rock? Just so with the transgressor, he falls from that height just because he wishes to appear good in the sight of the world. But what will a man gain if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

Whenever this was written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, "transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint or sinner!

Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came to his attention.

In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. One view was tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under discussion in the public press. It is illustrated in the following paragraph:

The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission. This may be true. At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce. She has no commerce of her own, and she probably never will have. There is a bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of mention. There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports, but we have noticed that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner, Mass., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called branch operating once per week between White River Junction and Montpelier, and a triweekly branch extending to Burlington. Montpelier is the home of Hiram Atkins, the famous "Nestor uv Checkerberry Journalism," and White River Junction is the whistling station and water-tank from which our country gets its election returns every four years. Burlington is located on Lake Champlain, and contains the summer residence of that grand old survivor of the glacial period, George F. Edmunds. Thus in a brief paragraph have we compressed all that can be said of the commerce and the railways of Vermont.

The other view is softened with the haze that hangs over the scenes of childhood in the minds of all men of feeling when interpreted by an artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and passes in a tear." It is from Field's little-known memorial to Mrs. Melvin L. Gray, written while he was in Southern California:

The quiet beauty of these scenes recalls a time which, in my life, is so long ago that I feel strangely reverential when I speak of it. I find myself thinking of my boyhood, and of the hills and valleys and trees and flowers and birds I knew when the morning of my life was fresh and full of exuberance. Those years were spent among the Pelham hills, very, very far from here; but memory o'erleaps the mountain ranges, the leagues upon leagues of prairie, the mighty rivers, the forest, the farming lands, o'erleaps them all; and to-day, by that same sweet magic that instantaneously undoes the years and space, I seem to be among the Pelham hills again. The yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the Connecticut, seen, not over miles of orange-groves, but over broad acres of Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more, and the elm and the chestnut trees, the shagbark walnut, the hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of this south land were unknown to me; and the Pelham hills were full of marvel and delight, with their tangled pathways and hidden stores of wintergreen and wild strawberries. Furtive brooks led the little boy hither and thither in his quest for trout and dace, while to the gentler-minded the modest flowers of the wild-wood appealed with singular directness. A partridge rose now and then from the thicket and whirred away, and with startled eyes the brown thrush peered out from the bushes. I see these pleasant scenes again, and I hear again the beloved sounds of old; and so with reverence and with welcoming I take up my task, for it was among these same Pelham hills that the dear lady of whom I am to speak was born and spent her childhood.



CHAPTER V

EDUCATION

There was more truth than epigrammatic novelty in Eugene Field's declaration that his education began when he fancied he had left it off for the serious business of life. Throughout his boyhood he was far from a hardy youth. He always gave the impression of having overgrown his strength, so that delicate health, and not indisposition to study, has been assigned as the excuse for his backwardness in "book larnin'" when it was decided to send him away from the congenial distractions of Amherst to the care of the Rev. James Tufts of Monson.

Monson is a very prettily situated Massachusetts town, about fifteen miles, as the crow flies, east of Springfield, and not more than twenty-five miles south by east of Amherst. It boasted then and still boasts one of the best equipped boys' academies in New England. It was not to the tender mercies of this academy, however, that Eugene was entrusted, but to the private tutorship of Mr. Tufts, whose life and character justify the tribute of Roswell Field that he is "one of those noble instructors of the blessed old school who are passing away from the arena of education in America." He is now, in 1901, in his ninetieth year, and is always spoken of among his neighbors as the "grand old man of Monson." From his own lips, accompanied by the lively comments of Mrs. Tufts, and from a loving communication written by him to the Springfield Republican shortly after Eugene Field's death I have gleaned the general facts of Eugene Field's school-days at Monson.



It was in the Fall of 1865 that Eugene became one of a class of six boys in the private school of Mr. Tufts. This school was chosen because Mr. Tufts had known the boy's parents and grandparents and felt a real interest in the lad. He would not have received the proper care at a large school, where "he would be likely to get into trouble with his love of fun and mischief." The house in which Eugene became as one of the family is situated about a mile from the village and faces the post road, on the farther side of which is a mill-pond, where both Eugene and Roswell came near making the writing of this memoir unnecessary by going over the dam in a rude boat of their own construction. Happily the experience resulted in nothing more serious than a thorough fright and a still more thorough ducking.

Back of the Tufts homestead rise some beautifully wooded hills, where Field and his schoolmates sought refuge from the gentle wrath of Mr. Tufts over their not infrequent delinquencies. The story is told in Monson that the boys, under the leadership of Field, built a "moated castle" of tree-trunks and brushwood in a well-nigh inaccessible part of these woods. Thence they sallied forth on their imaginary forays and thither they retired when in disgrace with Mr. Tufts. Around this retreat they dug a deep trench, which they covered artfully with boughs and dead leaves. Then they beguiled their reverend preceptor into chasing them to their "mountain fastness." Lightly they skipped across the concealed moat on the only firm ground they had purposely left, leaving him in the moment of exultant success to plunge neck deep into a tangled mass of brushwood and mud. In such playful ways as these Field endeared himself to the frequent forgiveness of Mr. Tufts. "It was impossible," said Mr. Tufts to me, "to cherish anger against a pupil whose contrition was as profuse and whimsical as his transgressions were frequent. The boys were boys."

Of Eugene's education when he came to Monson Mr. Tufts testifies: "In his studies he was about fitted for an ordinary high school, except in arithmetic. He had read a little Latin—enough to commence Caesar. I found him about an average boy in his lessons, not dull, but not a quick and ready scholar like his father, who graduated from Middlebury College at the age of fifteen, strong and athletic. He did not seem to care much for his books or his lessons anyway, but was inclined to get along as easily as he could, partly on account of his delicate health, which made close study irksome, and partly because his mind was very juvenile and undeveloped. His health improved gradually, while his interest in his studies increased slowly but steadily. Judge Forbes, of Westboro, for a time his room-mate and a remarkable scholar, remarked on reading his journal that his chum occasionally took up his book for study when his teacher came around, though he was not always particular which side up his book was. And so it was through life."

But Eugene did improve in his scholarship, and during the last six months before leaving to enter Williams College, in 1868, Mr. Tufts says he did seem "to catch something of the spirit of Cicero and Virgil and Homer [where was Horace?], and to catch a little ambition for an education." His gentle preceptor thus summed up the characteristics of the youth he was trying to fit for college:

"Eugene gave little if any indications of becoming a poet, or such a poet as he was, or even a superior writer, in his youth. He was always, however bright and lively in conversation, abounding in wit, self-possessed, and never laughing at his own jokes, showing, too, some of that exhaustless fountain of humor in which he afterward excelled. But he did not like confinement or close application, nor did he have patience to correct and improve what he wrote, as he afterward did when his taste was more cultivated. In declamation Eugene always excelled, reciting with marked effect 'Spartacus,' 'The Soldier of the Legion,' and 'The Dream of Clarence' from Shakespeare. He inherited from his father a rich, strong, musical, and sympathetic voice, which made him a pleasant speaker and afterward a successful public reader. He very naturally excelled in conversation at table and in getting up little comic almanacs, satirizing the boys, but always in good-humor, never descending to anything bitter or vulgar. Indeed, in all his fun, he showed ever a certain purity and nobility of character."

On one occasion, Eugene wearied of the persistent efforts of Mr. Tufts to place his feet on the first rung of the ladder to learning, and started off afoot for his home in Amherst. He followed the railway track, counting the ties for twenty-five miles, and arrived, thoroughly exhausted, full of contrition, and ready to take the first train back to school. This was probably the most severe physical effort of Eugene Field's life.

Mr. Tufts says that Field was "by nature and by his training, too, respectful toward religion and religious people, being at one time here [Monson] considerably moved and interested personally in a religious awakening, and speaking earnestly in meeting and urging the young to a religious life. Great credit for the remarkable success of Eugene is due to his Aunt Jones, Miss Mary French, and his guardian, Professor John Burgess, who were a continual and living influence about him until he arrived at maturity."

In 1868, at the age when his father was admitted to the bar of Vermont, Eugene Field, according to Mr. Tufts, was barely able to pass the examination for entrance at Williams "with some conditions." The only evidence preserved in the books of the college that he passed at all is the following entry:

Eugene Field, aged 18, September 5, 1868, son of R.M. Field, St. Louis.



Among the professors and residents of Williamstown there is scarcely a tradition or trace of his presence. He did not fit into the treadmill of daily lessons and lectures. He was impatient of routine and discipline. There is a story extant, which is a self-evident fabrication, that President Mark Hopkins, meeting him on the street one day, asked him how he was getting along with his studies. Field replied that he was doing very well. Thereupon President Hopkins, in kindly humor, remarked: "I am glad to hear it, for, remember, you have the reputation of three universities to maintain." This apocryphal story is greatly relished in Williamstown, where, among the professors, there seems to linger a strange feeling of resentment that Field was not recognized as possessing the budding promise that is better worth cultivating than the mediocrity of the ninety-and-nine orderly youths who pursue the uneventful tenor of college life to a diploma—and are never heard of afterward. There is a bare possibility, however, that President Hopkins might have referred to the fact that Eugene's grandfather held an A.B. from Williams and the honorary degree of A.M. from Dartmouth, while his father was an alumnus of Middlebury. It is more probably an after—and a merry—thought built upon Field's own unfinished career at Williams, Knox, and the University of Missouri.

From personal inquiry at Williamstown I find that none of the professors at Williams saw an encouraging gleam of aptitude for anything in the big-eyed, shambling youth whom Mr. Tufts had assiduously coached to meet the requirements of matriculation. There is a shadowy tradition that he did fairly well in his Latin themes when the subject suited his fancy, but his fancy more often led him to a sporting resort, kept by an ex-pugilist named Pettit, where he took a hand in billiards and made awkward essays with the boxing-gloves. Of course there is the inevitable yarn of a college town that he became so conceited over his skill in the manly art that he ventured to "stand up" before Pettit, to the bloody disfigurement of his countenance and the humiliation of his pride. If this is true, the lesson lasted him all his life, for a less combative adult than Eugene Field never graduated from an American college. He had a physical as well as a moral antipathy to personal participation in anything involving bodily danger or violence.

Even then Field possessed the wit and the plentiful lack of reverence for the conventionalities of life that must have rendered him both intolerable and incomprehensible to a body of serious-minded and necessarily conventional professors. The very traits that subsequently made him the most entertaining comrade in the world provoked only consternation and uneasiness at Williams. This eventually led President Hopkins to inform Mr. Tufts privately that it might be well for his pupil, as certainly it would conduce to the orderly life of Williamstown, if he would run up from Monson and persuade Eugene to return home with him. There was no dismissal, rustication, or official reprimand of Eugene Field by the ever-honored President Hopkins. Field simply faded out of the annals and class of 1872, as if he had never been entered at Williams.

Memories of Eugene Field are not as thick at Williamstown as blackberries on the Pelham hills. President Carter does not cherish them kindly because, perhaps, on the occasion of his appointment, Field gravely discussed his qualifications for the chair once occupied by Mark Hopkins as resting upon his contribution of "a small but active pellet" to the pharmaceutical equipment of his countrymen, famed for its efficacy to cure all disorders of mind and body "while you sleep."

"Hy." Walden, much in demand as an expressman, remembers Field as a somewhat reckless fellow and "dare-devil," and is authority for the story of Field's discomfiture in the boxing bout with the redoubtable Pettit.

Old Tom McMahon, who has been a familiar character to the students of Williams for nearly two generations, has a hazy recollection of the eccentric Eugene who flitted across the college campus a third of a century ago. He says that, if he "remembers right, Mr. Field was not one of the gentlemen who cared much for his clothes," but he "guessed he was made careless like, and in some ways he was a fine young man."



The most valuable glimpse of Field at Williams is contained in the following letter written by Solomon B. Griffin, the managing editor of the Springfield Republican for many years, with whom I have had some correspondence in respect to the matter referred to therein. He not only knew Field at Williamstown, but was one of his life-long friends and warmest admirers. After a few introductory words, under date of Springfield, February 4th, 1901, Mr. Griffin wrote:

Yes, I was of the class of 1872, but Field flitted before I became connected with it. But Williamstown was my birthplace and home and I struck up an acquaintance with him at Smith's college bookstore and the post-office. Field was raw and not a bit deferential to established customs, and so the secret-society men were not attracted to him. The "trotting" or preliminary attentions to freshmen constitute a great and revered feature of college life. When I saw Field "trotting" a lank and gawky freshman for the "Mills Theological Society," the humor of it appealed to one soaked in the traditions of a college town, and we "became acquainted." Field left the class about as I came in.

It is not remarkable that Tom McMahon has no clear recollection of Field, who was in college only about six months and was not a fraternity man. There are so many coming and going! Nor that the faculty should be mindful of the lawless, irresponsible boy, and not of the genius that developed on its own lines and was never conventionalized but always remained a sinner however brilliant, and a flayer of good men unblessed with a saving sense of humor. If there is any kind thought for me in my old home it is because I did what Field couldn't do, paid outward respect to the environment. It was possible for me to see his point of view and theirs—to them irreconcilable, and to him also.

Sincerely yours,

S.B. GRIFFIN.

Mr. Tufts's memorandum-book shows that Eugene returned to Monson April 27th, 1889, so his experience, if not his education, at Williams covered almost eight months of an impressionable period of his life. It is interesting to record the comment of Mrs. Tufts on the return of the wanderer to her indulgent care. "He was too smart for the professors at Williams," said she; "because they did not understand him, they could not pardon his eccentricities." That she did understand her husband's favorite pupil is evidenced in the following brief description, given off-hand to the writer: "Eugene was not much of a student, but very much of an irrepressible boy. There was no malice in his pranks, only the inherited disposition to tease somebody and everybody."

On July 5th, 1869, Eugene was summoned to St. Louis by the serious illness of his father, who died July 12th.

Thus ended his education, so far as it was to be affected by the environments and instructors of New England. Thenceforth he was destined to be a western man, with an ineradicable tang of Puritan prejudices and convictions cropping out unexpectedly and incongruously in all he thought and wrote.

In the autumn of 1869 Eugene entered the sophomore class at Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., where Professor John William Burgess, who had been chosen as his guardian, held the chair of logic, rhetoric, English literature, and political science. But his career at Knox was practically a repetition of that at Williams. He chafed under the restraint of set rules and the requirement of attention to studies in which he took no interest. If he had been allowed to choose, he would have devoted his time to reading the Latin classics and declaiming—that is, as much time as he could spare from plaguing the professors and interrupting the studies of his companions by every device of a festive and fertile imagination.

One year of this was enough for the faculty of Knox and for the restless scholar, so in the autumn of 1870 Eugene joined his brother Roswell in the junior class at the University of Missouri. Here Eugene Field ended, without graduating, such education as the school and the university was ever to give him, for in the spring of 1871 he left Columbia for St. Louis, never to return—a student at three universities and a graduate from none.

Of Eugene Field's life in Columbia many stories abound there and throughout Missouri. From the aged and honored historian of the university I have the following testimony as to the relations of the two brothers with that institution, premising it with the fact that all the official records of students were consumed in the fire that visited the university in 1892:

Roswell M. Field attended the university as a freshman in 1868-69, as a sophomore in 1869-70, and as a junior in 1870-71. He was a student of the institution these three sessions only. His brother Eugene Field was a student of the junior class, session 1870-71, and never before or since.

I knew both of them well. Eugene was an inattentive, indifferent student, making poor progress in the studies of the course—a genial, sportive, song-singing, fun-making companion. Nevertheless he was bright, sparkling, entertaining and a leader among "the boys." In truth he was in intellect above his fellows and a genius along his favorite lines. He was prolific of harmless pranks and his school life was a big joke.



There has been preserved the following specimen of the "rigs" Eugene was in the habit of grinding out at the expense of the faculty—this being aimed at President Daniel Reed (1868-77). The poem is entitled:

_BUCEPHALUS: A TAIL.

Twelve by the clock and all is well— That is, I think so, but who can tell? So quiet and still the city seems That even old Luna's brightest beams Cannot a single soul discover Upon the streets the whole town over.

The Marshal smiles a genial smile And retires to snooze for a little while, To dream of billies and dirks and slings, The calaboose and such pleasant things. The college dig now digs for bed With bunged-up eyes and aching head, Conning his lesson o'er and o'er, Till an audible melodious snore Tells that he's going the kingdom through Where Greek's at a discount and Latin, too.

The Doctor, robed in his snowy white, Gazes out from his window height, And he bends to the breezes his noble form, Like a stately oak in a thunderstorm, And watches his sleek and well-fed cows At the expense of the college browse. His prayers are said; out goes the light; Good-night; O learned pres, good-night.

Half-past five by Ficklin's time When I again renew my rhyme; Old Sol is up and the college dig Resumes his musty, classic gig, "Caesar venit celere jam." With here and there an auxiliary— The Marshal awakes and stalks around With an air importantly profound, And seizing on a luckless wight Who quietly stayed at home all night On a charge of not preserving order, Drags him before the just Recorder.

In vain the hapless youth denies it; A barroom loafer testifies it. "Fine him," the court-house rabble shout (This is the latest jury out). So when his pocketbook is eased Most righteous justice is appeased.

The Doctor lay in his little bed, His night-cap 'round his God-like head, With a blanket thick and snowy sheet Enveloped his l—— pshaw! and classical feet, And he cleared his throat and began: "My dear, As well in Indiana as here— I always took a morning ride, With you, my helpmeet, by my side.

"This morning is so clear and cool, We'll ride before it's time for school. Holloa, there John! you lazy cuss! Bring forth my horse, Bucephalus!" So spake the man of letters. Straight Black John went through the stable gate, But soon returned with hair on end, While terror wings his speed did lend, And out he sent his piteous wail: "O boss! Old Bucky's lost his tail!"

Down went the night-cap on the ground, Hats, boots and clothing flying round; In vain his helpmeet cried "Hold on!" He went right through that sable John. Sing, sing, O Muse, what deeds were done This morn by God-like Peleus' son; Descend, O fickle Goddess, urge My lyre to his bombastic splurge.

Boots and the man I sing, who first Those Argive machinations cursed; His swimming eyes did Daniel raise To that sad tail of other days, And cried "Alas! what ornery cuss Has shaved you, my Bucephalus?" Then turning round he gently sighed, "We will postpone our morning ride."

In wrath I smite my quivering lyre, Come once again, fair Muse, inspire My song to more heroic acts Than these poor simple, truthful facts. Cursed be the man who hatched the plot! Let dire misfortune be his lot! Palsied the hand that struck the blow! Blind be the eyes that saw the show! Hated the wretch who ruthless bled This innocent old quadruped.

Subpreps, a word of caution, please; Better prepare your A, B, C's Than prowl around at dead of night. Don't rouse the beast in Daniel's breast; Perhaps you'll come out second best.

Dear, gentle reader, pardon, pray, I'm thinking now I hear you say, "Oh, nonsense! what a foolish fuss About a horse, Bucephalus."_

This is no better verse, and possibly no worse, than much of the adolescent doggerel that is so often preserved by fond parents to prove that their child early gave signs of poetic and literary genius.



CHAPTER VI

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

Eugene Field was in his twenty-first year when he turned his back upon the colleges and faced life. Roswell M. Field, Sr., had been dead two years, and the moderate fortune which he had left, consisting mostly of realty valued at about $60,000, had not yet been distributed among the legatees, Eugene and Roswell M. Field and Mary French Field. To the last named one-fifth had been willed in recognition of the loving care she had bestowed upon the testator's two motherless sons, each of whom was to receive two-fifths of the father's estate. Eugene therefore looked forward to the possession of property worth something like $25,000. In St. Louis, in 1871, this was regarded as quite a large fortune. It would have been ample to start any young man, with prudence, regular habits, and a small modicum of business sense, well along in any profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature.

On first going to St. Louis to live, Eugene Field was peculiarly fortunate in being taken into the home and enduring friendship of Melvin L. Gray, the executor of his father's estate, and of Mrs. Gray. To the memory of the latter, on her death several years since, Eugene contributed a memorial from which I have already quoted and which in some respects is the most sincerely beautiful piece of prose he ever wrote. In that he refers to his first coming to St. Louis in the following terms:

My acquaintance with Mrs. Gray began in 1871. I was at that time just coming of age, and there were many reasons why I was attracted to the home over which this admirable lady presided. In the first-place Mrs. Gray's household was a counterpart of the households to which my boyhood life in New England had attracted me. Again both Mr. and Mrs. Gray were old friends of my parents; and upon Mr. Gray's accepting the executorship of my father's estate, Mrs. Gray felt, I am pleased to believe, somewhat more than a friendly interest in the two boys, who, coming from rural New England life into the great, strange, fascinating city, stood in need of disinterested friendship and prudent counsel. I speak for my brother and myself when I say that for the period of twenty years we found in Mrs. Gray a friend as indulgent, as forbearing, as sympathetic, as kindly suggestive and as disinterested as a mother, and in her home a refuge from temptation, care and vexation.



In the subscription edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse," of which I had all the labor and none of the fleeting fame of publisher, Field dedicated his paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm to Mr. Gray, and it was to this constant friend of his youth and manhood, who still survives (1901), that Field indited the beautiful dedication of "The Sabine Farm":

Come dear old friend! and with us twain To calm Digentian groves repair; The turtle coos his sweet refrain And posies are a-blooming there, And there the romping Sabine girls With myrtle braid their lustrous curls.

I have followed the original copy Field sent to Mr. Gray, which has several variations in punctuation from the version as printed in "The Sabine Farm," where the eighth line reads:

Bind myrtle in their lustrous curls,

which the reader can compare with the original as printed above. In that same dedication Field referred to Mr. Gray as one

Who lov'st us for our father's sake.

In announcing to Mr. Gray by letter, June 28th, 1891, his intention to make this dedication, Field wrote:

It will interest, and we [Roswell was a joint contributor to "The Sabine Farm"] are hoping that it will please you to know that we shall dedicate this volume to you, as a slight, though none the less sincere, token of our regard and affection to you, as the friend of our father and as the friend to us. Were our father living, it would please him, we think, to see his sons collaborating as versifiers of the pagan lyrist whose songs he admired; it would please him, too, we are equally certain, to see us dedicating a result of our enthusiastic toil to so good a man and to so good a friend as you.

These quotations are interesting as indicating the character of the surroundings of Eugene Field's early life in St. Louis.

It was the hope of their father that one, if not both, of his sons would adopt the profession of the law, in which he and his brother Charles and their father before them had attained both distinction and something more than a competence. But neither Eugene nor his brother Roswell had the slightest predilection for the law. By nature and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms of justice.

The stage, on the other hand, possessed a fascination for Eugene. He was a mimic by inheritance, a comedian by instinct and unrestrained habit. Everything appealed to his sense of the queer, the fanciful, and the utterly ridiculous. He was a student of the whimsicalities of character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love for reciting passages from "Spartacus," referred to by the Rev. Mr. Tufts, showed the bent of his mind, and when he became master of his own affairs he sought out Edwin Forrest and confided to him his ambition to go on the boards. Would that I could reproduce Field's version of that interview! He approached the great tragedian with a sinking heart, for Forrest had a reputation for brusque roughness never exceeded on or off the stage. But Eugene managed to prefer his request for advice and an opening in Forrest's company. The dark-browed Othello looked his visitor over from head to foot, and, in a voice that rolled through the flies of the stage where this little scene was enacted, exclaimed:

"Boy, return to your friends and bid them apprentice you to a wood-sawyer, rather than waste your life on a precarious profession whose successes are few and whose rewards are bankruptcy and ingratitude. Go! study and learn of Coriolanus."

This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words "boy," "wood-sawyer," and "Coriolanus," which always recurred in Field's various versions of "Why I did not go on the stage." Eugene returned to St. Louis and quietly disposed of the costumes he had prepared for such characters as Hamlet, Lear, and Spartacus.



Francis Wilson, in his "The Eugene Field I Knew," preserves the following story of Eugene's further venture in search of a profession:

He organized a company of his own in conjunction with his friend, Marvin Eddy, who tells of a comedy Field wrote in which the heroines were impersonated by Field himself to the heroes of the only other acting member of the cast—Mr. Eddy. A Madame Saunders was the orchestra, or rather the pianist, and Monsieur Saunders painted the posters which announced the coming of the "great and only" entertainment. Rehearsals were held in the hotel dining-rooms. While a darky carried a placard of announcement, the result of Saunders's artistic handiwork, the local band, specially engaged, played in front of the principal places in town. Mr. Eddy recalls that Field had a sweet bass voice which he used with much effect both in songs and recitations.

The season, confined to such towns in Missouri as Carrollton, Richmond, etc., lasted about two weeks and was what the papers would call a succes d'estime.

Which, being interpreted into the vernacular of the author of "Sharps and Flats," spelled a popular "frost" and a financial failure. And thus Missouri closed the door of comedy against Field, as Forrest had shut the gates of tragedy in his pale and intellectual face.

There was still one profession open to him in which he had made a few halting and tentative steps—that of journalism, with its broad entrance and narrowing perspective into the fair field of letters. While a sophomore at Knox he had exercised his irrepressible inclination "to shoot folly as it flies" by contributions to the local paper of Galesburg, which had the piquant flavor of personal comment. His youthful dash at the door of the stage had brought him into the comradeship of Stanley Waterloo and several other young journalists in St. Louis, and he was easily persuaded to try his 'prentice hand as a reporter, under the tutelage of Stanley Huntley, of the "Spoopendyke Papers" fame.

But Eugene Field was yet without the stern incentive of necessity that is the seed of journalism. Circumstances, however, were ripening that would soon leave him no excuse on that score for not buckling down to "sawing wood," as for twenty-three years he was wont to consider his daily work. When he reached his majority he was entitled to his share in the first distribution of his father's estate. Before this could be made, Mr. Gray had to dispose of a part of the land which he held as executor of Roswell M. Field. It was accordingly offered for sale at auction, and enough to realize $20,000 was sold. Under the will, Eugene's share of this was $8,000, and he immediately placed himself in the way of investing it where it would be the least incumbrance to him. While at Columbia he had met Edgar V. Comstock, the brother of his future wife, through whom it was that he made her acquaintance. Upon the first touch of the cash payment on his share of the executor's sale, Eugene at once proposed to young Comstock that they visit Europe in company, he bearing the expenses of the expedition. His friend did not need much persuasion to embark on what promised to be such a lark. And so, in the fall of 1872, the two, against the prudent counsels of Mr. Gray, set out to see the world, and they saw it just as far as Eugene's cash and the balance of that $8,000 would go.

In his "Auto-Analysis," Field says: "In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England." This is as near the sober truth as anything Field ever wrote about himself. The youthful spendthrift and his companion landed in Ireland, and by slow, but extravagant, stages reached Italy, taking the principal cities and sights of England and France en route. About the only letters that reached America from Field during this European trip (always excepting those that went by every mail-steamer to a young lady in St. Jo) were those addressed with business-like brevity to Mr. Gray, calling for more and still more funds to carry the travellers onward. Before they had reached Italy the mails were too slow to convey Field's importunity, and he had recourse to the cable to impress Mr. Gray with the dire immediateness of his impecuniosity. In order to relieve this Mr. Gray was forced to discount the notes for the deferred payments on the sale of the Field land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets and an inexhaustible fund of mirthful stories and invaluable experience.

On arriving in New York, Field had to seek the Western Union Telegraph office to secure funds for the necessary transportation to St. Louis. These Mr. Gray furnished so liberally that Eugene promptly invested the surplus in a French poodle, which he carried in triumph back to Missouri as a memento of his sojourn in Paris. This costly pet, the sole exhibit of his foreign travel, he named McSweeny, in memory, I suppose, of the pleasant days he had spent in Ireland.



Years afterward I remember to have been with Field when he opened a package containing a watch, which for more than a decade had been an unredeemed witness to his triumphant entry into and impecunious exit from Naples or Florence—I forget which.

Mrs. Below, Field's sister-in-law, in her little brochure, "Eugene Field in His Home," preserves a letter written by him from Rome to a friend in Ireland, in which may be traced the bent of his mind to take a whimsical view of all things coming within the range of his observation. In this he bids farewell to political discussion:

For since the collapse of the Greeley and Brown movement I have given over all hope of rescuing my torn and bleeding country from Grant and his minions, and have resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. Methinks, my country will groan to hear this declaration!

And there is the following description of how he was enjoying himself in Italy, with the last remittances of his patrimony growing fewer and painfully less:

We have been two months in Nice and a month or so travelling in Italy. Two weeks we passed in Naples, and a most delightful place we found it. Its natural situation is simply charming, though the climate is said to be very unhealthy. I climbed Vesuvius and peered cautiously into the crater. It was a glorious sight—nothing else like it in the world! Such a glorious smell of brimstone! Such enlivening whiffs of hot steam and sulphuric fumes! Then too the grand veil of impenetrable white smoke that hung over the yawning abyss! No wonder people rave about this crater and no wonder poor Pliny lost his life coming too near the fascinating monster. The ascent of Vesuvius is no mean undertaking, and I advise all American parents to train their children especially for it by drilling them daily upon their backyard ash-heaps.

His descent of Vesuvius was made "upon a dead run," and he "astonished the natives by my [his] celerity and recklessness."

This letter was written on Washington's birthday, 1873, and in later years the omission of any reference to the anniversary would have thrown suspicion on its genuineness; but Field had not yet begun to reckon life by anniversaries. Neither is there in it a shadow of the impending crisis in his finances nor a suggestion of another reason that robbed his return voyage of all distressing thoughts of retreat.



CHAPTER VII

MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE

And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted in his written tributes to womankind and mother love. In his memorial to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for the love between parent and child. "For my dear mother," he wrote, "went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the blessedness of a mother's love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a thing." This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims.

Through his boyhood and school days, Field's affection for the petticoated sex had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease all the daughters of Eve. It is doubtful if his affections were ever more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of school or college. He came to both in his own way and time; with the difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden's hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of scholarship and letters.

It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European trip and experiences. Now Edgar's parents lived at St. Joseph, and with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still in short dresses. What more natural than that Edgar's elder sisters should visit him during his college term and there meet and be attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag in Columbia? Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo. Besides, what interest would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?

Out of the friendship of Eugene and Edgar and the visit of Edgar's sisters to Columbia, fate was weaving a web for the unsuspecting subject of this narrative which was not to be denied or altered by leaving little Julia to rusticate at home like another pretty little Cinderella. But this is not a fairy tale. It has no prince or glass slippers or pumpkin coaches, with which Field's fancy could have invested it. When the two friends separated on Commencement Day, after Field had delivered an oration that impressed Miss Ida (Mrs. Below), because of "his pale face and deep voice," a promise had been extorted that he would visit the Comstocks in their home in St. Joseph.

In the usual course of human events nothing further of concern to us would have come from the exchange of these common civilities of student life. Edgar would have returned to his home and forgotten Eugene, and Eugene would have gone his way and never known that Edgar had a younger sister Julia sitting at the gate awaiting the coming of her prince. But shortly after returning to St. Louis, Field was inspired by his natural roving restlessness—the French call it Fate—to run clear across the state of Missouri, some three hundred miles, to see what kind of a town St. Joseph was and incidentally to visit his college friend. Nearly twenty years later, in the gathering gloom of a rented apartment in London, the still-constant lover wrote of what happened when he first saw "Saint Jo, Buchanan County," in the early seventies. There he first met "the brown-eyed maiden" of his song, the Julia of numberless valentines that ran the gamut of grave and gay through the intervening years, the heroine of frequent drives which they "snailed along," as their proper horse went slow,

In those leafy aisles, where Cupid smiles In Lover's Lane, Saint Jo.

* * * * *

Ah! sweet the hours of springtime When the heart inclines to woo, And it's deemed all right for the callow wight To do what he wants to do.

In his "Auto-Analysis" Field says, "I favor early marriage." Even if Edgar Comstock's elder sisters had known this, it is doubtful whether the thought would have crossed their minds that their brother's chum of twenty-one would overlook their more mature charms (they were all fair to look upon), to be more than gracious to their fourteen-year-old sister. Time out of mind sophisticated sisters of sixteen and eighteen have regarded younger sisters as altogether out of the sphere of those attentions which find their echo in wedding bells, only to awake some bright morning to find the child a woman and the attentive friend an accepted lover.

So it happened in this case. While her sisters were thinking how good it was of Field to take so much interest in a mere child, their long afternoon drives together down "Lovers' Lane, Saint Jo," had come to that happy turn that ignores all immaturities of age and lays the life of a man at the feet of the maid—albeit, the feet are still strangers to the French heels and have not yet known the witchery that goes with long dresses. Once sure of himself, Field lost no time in making his wishes known not only to Mistress Julia, but to her astonished family. She listened and was lost and won. Her parents expostulated that she was but a child. Field had no difficulty in convincing them that she would outgrow that. He pleaded for an immediate marriage, but her father firmly insisted that though Julia might not be too young to love and be loved, she was "o'er young to marry yet." Field was forced to accept the sensible decree against the early realization of his hopes and returned to St. Louis with the understanding that he should establish himself in business and wait until Miss Comstock was eighteen.

Whether this had anything to do with Field's going to Europe or not I cannot say. It had nothing to do with his return, for his term of waiting for his modern Rachel had still two years to run when he got back from Europe. There is a pretty story told that after all arrangements were made for his European trip and he and Edgar Comstock, accompanied by Miss Ida, had reached New York, she and her brother were amazed to receive a note by mail saying, "Important business has called me back to St. Joseph; I hope you will pardon my sudden leave-taking." They knew the nature of his important business and had to wait with what patience they could command while he posted fifteen hundred miles and returned with barely time, if all connections served, to catch the steamer.

Field never dreamed of fulfilling that condition of his probation which required him to become established in business. If he had done so the date of his marriage would have been indefinitely postponed. He returned from Europe, as we have seen, sans the better part of his patrimony, in the spring of 1873, and instead of attempting to establish himself in business, immediately set himself to secure an abridgment of his term of waiting. The years between fourteen and eighteen run slow. To every true lover Time moves with leaden feet. As Rosalind tells us, "Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized: if the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven year." What wonder then if the four years they were pledged to wait seemed an eternity, and that both set themselves to abridge it by all the arts and persuasion of young lovers. They pleaded and contrived so cunningly and successfully that the obdurate parents finally acceded to their wishes, and Eugene Field and Julia Sutherland Comstock were married at St. Joseph on October 16th, 1873. The bride "at that time was a girl of sixteen," is the laconic and only comment of the "Auto-Analysis." This he supplemented with the further information, "we have had eight children—three daughters and five sons."



But this is jumping from Saint Jo into the future more than a score of years in advance of our story. The young couple spent their honeymoon in the East. Field took especial delight in showing his bride of sixteen the wonders of New York and in playing practical jokes upon her unsophisticated nature, thereby keeping her in a perpetual state of amazement or of terror as to what he would do next. He sought to make her at home at Delmonico's by ordering "boiled pig's feet a la Saint Jo," with a gravity of countenance that tested the solemnity of the waiters and provoked the protest, "Oh, Eugene!" that was to be the feminine accompaniment to his boyish humor throughout their married life. No matter how often Field played his antics before or on his wife, they always seemed to take her by surprise and evoked a remonstrance in which pride over his mirthfulness mollified all displeasure.

By the time Field returned to St. Louis his ready funds were exhausted and he had to appeal to Mr. Gray to raise more by mortgaging the balance of his interest in his father's property. This is as good a place as any to take leave of the patrimony that came to Field at the death of his father, for he was never to see any more dividends from that source. When the loans fell due there were no funds to pay them, nor equity in the land to justify their renewal. So the land was sold and bid in by Mr. Gray, who holds it yet and would gladly dispose of it for what he paid out of his pocket and the goodness of his heart.

Roswell Field tells an interesting story of how their father's land speculation went out of sight in the queer mutations that befall real estate. In the year before Roswell the elder died, he took his younger son for a drive in the country south of St. Louis, where the property lies unimproved to this day. "Rosy," said the father, "hold on to your Carondelet property. In fifteen years it will be worth half a million dollars, and, very likely, a million and a half." That was thirty-three years ago when the Carondelet iron furnaces were in full blast and the city seemed stretching southward. In 1869 the property was appraised at $125,000. The panic came on and St. Louis changed its mind and headed toward the west, where the best part of the city now rears its mansions and wonders how it ever dreamed of going south. There Carondelet still bakes in the sun, on the far side of a slough which has diverted a fortune from the sons of the sanguine Roswell M. Field, the elder.

More provident than his brother, Roswell lived comfortably on his share for nearly seven years, only in the end to envy the superior shrewdness of Eugene, who, putting his portion into cash, realized more from it, and spent it like a lord while it lasted. I must confess that I share Roswell's views, for the investment which Eugene Field made in the two years after coming of age in spending $20,000 on experience, returned to him many fold in the profession he was finally driven to adopt, not as a pastime, but to earn a livelihood for himself and his growing family.

Having shot his bolt, Field went to work as a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. He was not much of a success as a reporter for the simple reason that his fancy was more active than his legs and he was irresistibly disposed to save the latter at the expense of the former.

The best pen picture I have been able to secure of Field at this period of his career is from his life-long friend, William C. Buskett, the hero of "Penn Yan Bill," to whom Field dedicated "Casey's Table d'Hote," the first poem in "A Little Book of Western Verse."

"My association with Eugene Field," says Mr. Buskett, "began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1872. We had a little circle of friends that was surely to be envied in that we were fond of each other and our enjoyment was pure and genuine. In 1875 we formed what was known as the 'Arion Quartette,' composed of Thomas L. Crawford, now clerk in the United States Circuit Court in St. Louis, Thomas C. Baker (deceased), Roswell Martin Field, a brother of Eugene, and myself. 'Gene (as he was always called by his intimates) did not sing in the quartette, though he had a good voice. We frequently gave entertainments, at which Eugene was always the centre of attraction. The 'Old Sexton' was his favorite song. He was a great mimic and tease, and was always bubbling over with fun. At that time he was living on Adams Street, and many of these entertainments were given at his house. His household then consisted of himself, wife, and baby 'Trotty,' the pet name given his eldest daughter, Mary French Field, and with them Mrs. Comstock, mother of Mrs. Field, Edgar V. and Misses Carrie, Georgia, and Gussie Comstock, a delightful family.

"There was a genuine bond of friendship among us all then, for we were comparatively oblivious to care and trouble. We were all poor, you may say, earning reasonable salaries, but that never seemed to worry us much. If one had a dollar we would always divide and the crowd was never a cent ahead, but we defied misfortune.

"Among the pranks that Eugene used to play upon his wife in those days was that of appearing at some of our rehearsals on a warm evening in a costume that never failed to tease her. He would walk into the parlor and say: 'Well, boys, let us take off our coats and take it easy; it's too hot.' We would all proceed to do so. When Eugene would remove his coat he would display a red flannel undershirt, having pinned his cuffs to his coat sleeves and his necktie and collar to his shirt. He placed no limit on his humor."

Who of those at all intimate with Field will forget the enjoyment he took in trolling forth, in a quaint, quavering, cracked, but tuneful recitative, one stanza of "Ossian's Serenade":

I'll chase the antelope over the plain The tiger's cub I'll bind with a chain, The wild gazelle with its silvery feet I'll give to thee as a playmate sweet. Then come with me in my light canoe, While the sea is calm and the sky is blue, For I'll not linger another day For storms may rise and love decay.

Well, this was a snatch that lingered in his memory from the old days in Adams Street, St. Louis, where he first caught it from the lips of Mr. Buskett, in whose family it was an heirloom. Field finally traced it to its source through persistent letters written to himself in his "Sharps and Flats" column in the Chicago Record.

The glad wild days of which Mr. Buskett testifies were passed in St. Louis after Field's return from a brief experience as city editor of the St. Joseph Gazette in 1875-76. The time is fixed by the presence of "Trotty" in the gypsy circle, who was the best bit of news he "managed to acquire" in the days whereof he wrote:

Oh, many a peck of apples and of peaches did I get When I helped 'em run the local on the "St. Jo Gazette."

Judge Henry W. Burke, of St. Joseph, is authority for this story of the time when he was associated with Field on the Gazette: Burke had been sent out to report a "swell society event" in the eastern part of the city. Nearly all the prominent people of St. Joseph were present and the names of all were published. Burke's story of the affair was a column long, and after it was written Field got hold of the copy and at the end of the list of those present added, "and last but not least the handsome and talented society editor of the Gazette, H.W. Burke." The feelings of the young reporter and embryo judge may be imagined.

But a few months of "whooping up locals on the St. Jo Gazette" were enough for Eugene, who pined for the broader field and more congenial associations of St. Louis. Thither he returned in the spring of 1876, and the Evening Journal, being by this time consolidated with the Times, he became an editorial writer and paragrapher on the hyphenated publication. He also resumed the eccentric semi-bohemian life which Mr. Buskett has rather suggested than described. He had little or no business ability, had no use for money except to spend it, and therefore early adopted the plan of leaving to Mrs. Field the management of their household expenditures. To her, then, as throughout his life, was paid his weekly stipend—often depleted by the drafts for the "usual V" or the "necessary X" which he was wont to draw in advance from the cashier almost every week.

Before the newspaper cashier had risen as a life-saving station on the horizon of Eugene Field's constant impecuniosity, his father's executor, Mr. Gray, had been the object of his intermittent appeals for funds to meet pressing needs. The means he invented to wheedle the generous, but methodical, executor out of these appropriations afforded Field more genuine pleasure than the success that attended them. The coin they yielded passed through his fingers like water through a sieve, but the enjoyment of his happy schemes abided in his memory and also in that of his constant friend always. One of Field's most effective methods of securing an advance from Mr. Gray was the threat of going on the stage under the assumed name of Melvin L. Gray. On one occasion Field approached him for money for living expenses, and being met with what appeared to be an unrelenting negative, coolly said: "Very well, if you cannot advance it to me out of the estate I shall be compelled to go on the stage. But as I cannot keep my own name I have decided to assume yours, and shall have lithographs struck off at once. They will read, 'To-night, M.L. Gray, Banjo and Specialty Artist.'" It is needless to say that the much-needed funds were found. But whether they went to the payment of living expenses, to the importunity of some threatening creditor, or were divided between the joys of the bibliomaniac and the bon vivant, Field in his most confiding humor never disclosed to me.

But this I know, that one of these always respectful, if apparently threatening, appeals to Mr. Gray, was the basis for one of the few newspaper attacks on Eugene Field that he resented deeply. Some time after he had left St. Louis and was engaged on the Denver Tribune, the Spectator, a weekly paper of the former city, contained the following gossip regarding him which was written in a thoughtless rather than an intentionally inimical spirit:

One of the cleverest young journalists of this city, a few years ago, was Mr. Eugene Field, whose charming short poems and witty paragraphs still occasionally find their way into our paper from Denver, where he is now located. Mr. Field was the happy possessor of one of those sunny dispositions which is thoroughly antagonistic to trouble of every description; he absolutely refused to entertain the black demon under any pretext whatever, and after spending a small fortune with the easy grace of a prince, he settled down to doing without one with equal grace and nonchalance, in a manner more creditable to himself than satisfying to his creditors. Did his hatter or tailor present an untimely bill, the gay debonnaire Eugene would scribble on the back thereof an impromptu rhyme expressive of his deep regret at not being able to offer the cash instead, and return the same with an airy grace that the renowned orator, J. Wilkins Micawber, himself might have envied.

While the intellectual prominences upon the cranium of our friend and fellow-citizen had been well looked to, Dame Nature totally neglected to develop his bump of veneration; age possessed no qualities, wealth and position no prerogatives, which this singularly constituted young man felt bound to respect. When his father's executor, an able and exceedingly dignified member of the St. Louis bar, would refuse to respond to his frequent demands for moneyed advances, the young reprobate would coolly elevate his heels to a point in dangerous proximity to the old gentleman's nose, and threaten to go upon the stage, taking his guardian's honored name as a stage pseudonym and representing himself to be his son. This threat generally sufficed to bring the elder gentleman to terms, as he knew his charge's ability to execute as well as to threaten.

He was an inveterate joker, and his tendency to break out without regard to fitness of time or place into some mad prank made him almost a terror to his friends. On one occasion he informed a young lady friend that he did not think he would be able to come to her wedding because he had such a terrible toothache. "Then why not have your tooth pulled out?" said the young lady. "I never thought of that," quoth Eugene gravely; "I guess I will." When the wedding day arrived, among the other bridal gifts came a small box bearing Mr. Field's card, and reposing on a velvet cushion inside was the identical tooth which the bride had advised him to have extracted, and in the cavity where had once throbbed the agonizing nerve was neatly stuffed a fifty-dollar bill.

The recollection of the many amusing traits and freaks of this versatile genius affords amusement to the innumerable friends of his to this day. But time which sobers us all has doubtless taken some of the foam and sparkle from this rare spirit, although it would be hard to convince his friends that he will ever be anything but the gay and debonnaire Eugene.

Mr. Gray, who vouches for the general accuracy of the story of the strange wedding present, with its costly filling, preserves among his most cherished mementoes of his foster son-in-law, if I may be allowed the expression, Field's prompt repudiation of that paragraph in the above which charged him with lack of respect for one from whom he had received every evidence of affection:

DENVER, June 25, 1883.

DEAR MR. GRAY,

A copy of last Saturday's St. Louis Spectator has just arrived and I am equally surprised, pained and indignant to find in it a personal article about myself which represents me in the untruthful light of having been disrespectful and impudent to you. I believe you will bear me out when I say that my conduct towards you has upon all occasions been respectful and gentlemanly. I may not have been able to repay you the many obligations you have placed me under, but I have always regarded you with feelings of affectionate gratitude and I am deeply distressed lest the article referred to may create a widely different impression. Of course it makes no difference to you, but as gratitude is about all I have in this world to bestow on those who are good and kind to me, it is not right that I should be advertised—even in a joking way—as an ingrate.

Yours sincerely,

EUGENE FIELD.

This letter is valuable in more ways than the one which it was so unnecessarily written to serve. It is a negative admission of the general faithfulness of the impression left by Field upon those familiar with his life in St. Louis, and the reference to gratitude as all he had to bestow upon his true friends will be recognized as genuine by all who ever came near enough to his inner life to appreciate its sweetness as well as its lightness. As for his airy method of disposing of insistent creditors I have no doubt that the rhymes on the backs of their bills more often than not were more to them than the dollars and cents on their faces.

During the second period of his life in St. Louis two sons were born to Field and his wife, Melvin G., named after the "Dear Mr. Gray," of the foregoing letter, and Eugene, Jr., who, being born when the Pinafore craze was at its height, received the nickname of "Pinny," which has adhered to him to the present time. The fact that Melvin of all the children of Eugene Field was never called by any other name by a father prone to giving pet names, more or less fanciful, to every person and thing with which he came in contact, is, I take it, an even more sincere tribute to the high respect and love, if not reverence, in which he held Melvin's godfather.

The third son and last child born to Field during the time of which I am now writing appeared upon the scene, with his two eyes of wondrous blue, very like his father's, at Kansas City, whither the family had moved in the year 1880. Although he was duly christened Frederick, this newcomer was promptly nicknamed "Daisy," because, forsooth, Field one day happened to fancy that his two eyes looked like daisies peeping up at him from the grass. The similitude was far fetched, but the name stuck.

In Kansas City, where Field went from St. Louis to assume at thirty years of age the managing editorship of the Times of that town, the family lived in a rented house which was made the rendezvous for all the light-hearted members of the newspaper and theatrical professions. Perhaps I cannot give a more faithful picture of Field's life through all this period than is contained in the following unpublished lines, to the original manuscript of which I supplied the title, "The Good Knight and His Lady." Perhaps I should explain that it was written at a time when Field was infatuated with the stories and style of the early English narratives of knights and ladies:

_THE GOOD KNIGHT AND HIS LADY

Soothly there was no lady faire In all the province could compare With Lady Julia Field, The noble knight's most beauteous wife For whom at any time his life He would righte gladly yield.

'Twas at a tourney in St. Joe The good knight met her first, I trow, And was enamoured, straight; And in less time than you could say A pater noster he did pray Her to become his mate.

And from the time she won his heart, She sweetly played her wifely part— Contented with her lot! And tho' the little knightly horde Came faster than they could afford The good wife grumbled not.

But when arrived a prattling son, She simply said, "God's will be done— This babe shall give us joy!" And when a little girl appeared, The good wife quoth: "'Tis well—I feared 'Twould be another boy!"

She leased her castle by the year— Her tables groaned with sumptuous cheer, As epicures all say; She paid her bills on Tuesdays, when On Monday nights that best of men— Her husband—drew his pay.

And often, when the good knight craved A dime wherewith he might get shaved, She doled him out the same; For these and other generous deeds The good and honest knight must needs Have loved the kindly dame.

At all events, he never strayed From those hymeneal vows he made When their two loves combined; A matron more discreet than she Or husband more devote than he It would be hard to find.

July 4th, 1885._

And so in very sooth it would have been. Under what circumstances and with what purpose Field wrote this I cannot now recall, if I ever knew. Nothing like it exists among my many manuscripts of his. It is written in pencil on what appears to be a sheet from a pad of ledger paper, watermarked "1879," a fact I mention for the benefit of his bibliomaniac admirers. And, what is most peculiar, it is written on both sides of the sheet—something most unusual with Field, except in correspondence—where the economy of the old half ounce three-cent postage and his New England training prevailed over his disposition to be lavish with paper if not with ink. Anyway, Field's "Good Knight and His Lady" gives a clearer insight into his home relations than any other thing that has been preserved respecting them. That it was prepared with care is witnessed by several interlineations in ink, sealed by a blot of his favorite red ink on the corner, which for a wonder does not bear the marks of the deliberate blemishes with which he frequently embellished his neatest manuscripts.



CHAPTER VIII

EARLY EXPERIENCES IN JOURNALISM

Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of a tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams. He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or "copy" of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter's day. What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers. The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived. Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature. I wonder why I wrote "western" when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado? From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls, and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire.

There was little about his work at this time that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher. Looking back it is possible, however, to discover something of the flavor of the inextinguishable drollery that persisted to his last printed work in such verses as these in the St. Louis Journal:

_THE NEW BABY

We welcome thee, eventful morn Since to the poet there is born A son and heir; A fuzzy babe of rosy hue, And staring eyes of misty blue Sans teeth, sans hair.

Let those who know not wedded joy Revile this most illustrious boy— This genial child! But let the brother poets raise Their songs and chant their sweetest lays To him reviled.

Then strike, O bards, your tuneful lyres, 'Awake, O rhyming souls, your fires, And use no stint! Bring forth the festive syrup cup— Fill every loyal beaker up With peppermint!

March, 1878._

In the spring of 1879 the St. Louis Times-Journal printed the following April verses by Field, which were copied without the author's name by London Truth, and went the rounds of the papers in this country, credited to that misnamed paper, and attributed, much to Field's glee, to William S. Gilbert, then at the height of his Pinafore and Bab Ballad fame:

_APRIL VESPERS

The turtles drum in the pulseless bay, The crickets creak in the prickful hedge, The bull-frogs boom in the puddling sedge And the whoopoe whoops its vesper lay Away In the twilight soft and gray.

Two lovers stroll in the glinting gloam— His hand in her'n and her'n in his— She blushes deep—he is talking biz— They hug and hop as they listless roam— They roam— It's late when they get back home.

Down by the little wicket-gate, Down where the creepful ivy grows, Down where the sweet nasturtium blows, A box-toed parent lies in wait— In wait For the maiden and her mate.

Let crickets creak and bull-frogs boom, The whoopoe wail in the distant dell— Their tuneful throbs will ne'er dispel The planted pain and the rooted gloom— The gloom Of the lover's dismal doom._

Just by the way of illustrating in fac-simile and preserving the character of the newspaper paragrapher's work in the last century, the following "Funny Fancies," by Field, from the St. Louis Journal of August 3d, 1878, may be of interest:

A green Christmas—No, no, we mean a green peach makes a fat graveyard.

A philanthropic citizen of Memphis has wedded a Miss Hoss. He doubtless took her for wheel or whoa.

We have tried every expedient and we find that the simple legend: "Smallpox in this House" will preserve the most uninterrupted bliss in an editorial room.

There is a moment when a man's soul revolts against the dispensations of Providence, and that is when he finds that his wife has been using his flannel trousers to wrap up the ice in.

To the average Athenian the dearest spot on earth is the Greece spot.

Mr. Deer was hung at Atlanta. Of course he died game.

'Tis pleasant at the close of day To play Croquet.

And if your partner makes a miss Why kiss The siss.

But if she gives your chin a thwack, Why whack Her back!

A great many newspaper men lie awake night after night mentally debating whether they will leave their property to some charitable institution or spend it the next day for something with a little lemon in it.

It was during his earlier connection with the St. Louis Journal that Field was assigned the duty of misreporting Carl Schurz, when that peripatetic statesman stumped Missouri in 1874 as a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate. Field in later years paid unstinted tribute to the logic, eloquence, and patriotic force of Mr. Schurz's futile appeals to the rural voters of Missouri. But during the trip his reports were in nowise conducive to the success of the Republican and Independent candidate. Mr. Schurz's only remonstrances were, "Field, why will you lie so outrageously?" It was only by the exercise of careful watchfulness that Mr. Schurz's party was saved from serious compromise through the practical jokes and snares which Field laid for the grave, but not revered Senator. On one occasion when a party of German serenaders appeared at the hotel where the party was stopping, before Mr. Schurz had completed a necessary change of toilet Field stepped out on the veranda, and, waving the vociferous cornet and trombone to silence, proceeded to address the crowd in broken English. As he went on the cheering soon subsided into amazed silence at the heterodox doctrines he uttered, until the bogus candidate was pushed unceremoniously aside by the real one. Mr. Schurz had great difficulty in saving Field from the just wrath of the crowd, which had resented his broken English more than his political heresies.

On another occasion when there was a momentary delay on the part of the gentleman who was to introduce Mr. Schurz, Field stepped to the front and with a strong German accent addressed the gathering as follows:

LADIES AND SHENTLEMEN: I haf such a pad colt dot et vas not bossible for me to make you a speedg to-night, but I haf die bleasure to introduce to you my prilliant chournatistic friend Euchene Fielt, who will spoke you in my blace.

It was all done so quickly and so seriously that the joke was complete before Mr. Schurz could push himself into the centre of the stage. Annoyance and mirth mingled in the explanations that followed. A love of music common to both was the only thing that made Field tolerable to his serious-minded elder.

Regarding Eugene Field's work upon the St. Jo Gazette, it was local in character and of the most ephemeral nature. There is preserved in the pocket-books of some old printers in the West the galley proof of a doggerel rhyme read by him at the printers' banquet, at St. Joseph, Mo., January 1st, 1876. It details the fate of a "Rat" printer, who, in addition to the mortal offence of "spacing out agate" type with brevier, sealed his doom by stepping on the tail of our old friend, the French poodle McSweeny. The execution of the victim's sentence was described as follows:

His body in the fatal cannon then they force Shouting erstwhile in accents madly hoarse, "Death to all Rats"—the fatal match is struck, The cannon pointed upwards—then kerchuck! Fiz! Snap! Ker—boom! Slug 14's grotesque form Sails out to ride a race upon the storm, Up through the roof, and up into the sky— As if he sought for "cases" up on high, Till like a rocket, or like one who's trusted, He fell again to earth—completely busted.

There is not much suggestion, or even promise, in this doggerel, of the Eugene Field whose verses of occasion were destined within a dozen years to be sought for in every newspaper office in America.

Long before Field learned the value of his time and writing, he began to appreciate the value of printer's ink and showed much shrewdness in courting its favor. He did not wait for chance to bring his wares into notice, but early joined the circle of busy paragraphers who formed a wider, if less distinguished, mutual admiration society than that free-masonry of authorship which at one time almost limited literary fame in the United States to Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Robert J. Burdette is about the only survivor of the coterie of paragraphers, who, a quarter of a century ago, made such papers as the Burlington Hawkeye, the Detroit Free Press, the Oil City Derrick, the Danbury News, and the Cincinnati Saturday Night, widely quoted throughout the Union for their clever squibs and lively sallies. Field put himself in the way of the reciprocating round of mutual quotation and spicy comment, and before he left St. Louis his "Funny Fancies" in the Times-Journal had the approval of his fellow-jesters if they could not save that paper from its approaching doom.

Before leaving St. Louis, however, Eugene Field was to strike one of the notes that was to vibrate so sweetly and surely to his touch unto the end. He had lost one baby son in St. Jo, and Melvin was a mere large-eyed infant when his father was moved at Christmas-time, 1878, to write his "Christmas Treasures," which he frequently, though incorrectly, declared to be "the first verse I ever wrote." He probably meant by this that it was the first verse he ever wrote "that he cared to preserve," those specimens I have introduced being only given as marking the steps crude and faltering by which he attained a facility and technique in the art of versification seldom surpassed.

In Mr. Field's "Auto-Analysis" will be found the following reference to this early specimen of his verse:

I wrote and published my first bit of verse in 1879: It was entitled "Christmas Treasures" [see "Little Book of Western Verse"]. Just ten years later I began suddenly to write verse very frequently.

Which merely indicates what little track Field kept of how, when, or where he wrote the verse that attracted popular attention and by which he is best remembered. I need hardly say that with a few noteworthy exceptions his most highly-prized poems were written before 1888, as a reference to the "Little Book of Western Verse," above cited, and which was published in 1889, will clearly show.

In the year 1880 Field received and accepted an offer of the managing editorship of the Kansas City Times, a position which he filled with singular ability and success, but which for a year put an almost absolute extinguisher on his growth as a writer. Under his management the Times became the most widely-quoted newspaper west of the Mississippi. He made it the vehicle for every sort of quaint and exaggerated story that the free and rollicking West could furnish or invent. He was not particular whether the Times printed the first, fullest, or most accurate news of the day so long as its pages were racy with the liveliest accounts and comments on the daily comedy, eccentricity, and pathos of life.

Right merrily did he abandon himself to the buoyant spirits of an irrepressible nature. Never sparing himself in the duties of his exacting position on the Times, neither did he spare himself in extracting from life all the honey of comedy there was in it. His salary did not begin to keep pace with his tastes and his pleasures. But he faced debts with the calm superiority of a genius to whom the world owed and was willing to pay a living.

There lived in Kansas City, when Field was at the height of his local fame there, one George Gaston, whose cafe and bar was the resort of all the choice spirits of the town. He fairly worshipped Field, who made his place famous by entertainments there, and by frequent squibs in the Times. Although George had a rule suspending credit when the checks given in advance of pay day amounted to more than a customer's weekly salary, he never thought of enforcing it in the case of 'Gene. More than once some particularly fine story or flattering notice of the good cheer at Gaston's sufficed to restore Field's credit on George's spindle. At Christmas-time that credit was under a cloud of checks for two bits (25 cents), four bits, and a dollar or more each to the total of $135.50, when, touched by some simple piece that Field wrote in the Times, Gaston presented his bill for the amount endorsed "paid in full." When the document was handed to Field he scanned it for a moment and then walked over to the bar, behind which George was standing smiling complacently and eke benevolently.

"How's this, George?" said Field.

"Oh, that's all right," returned George.

"But this is receipted," continued the ex-debtor.

"Sure," said the gracious creditor.

"Do I understand," said Field, with a gravity that should have warned his friend, "that I have paid this bill?"

"That's what," was George's laconic assurance.

"In full?"

"In full's what I said," murmured the unsuspecting philanthropist, enjoying to the full his own magnanimity.

"Well, sir," said Field, raising his voice without relaxing a muscle, "Is it not customary in Missouri when one gentleman pays another gentleman in full to set up the wine?"

George could scarcely respire for a moment, but gradually recovered sufficiently to mumble, "Gents, this is one on yours truly. What'll you have?"

And with one voice Field's cronies, who were witnesses to the scene, ejaculated, "Make it a case." And they made a night of it, such as would have rejoiced the hearts of the joyous spirits of the "Noctes Ambrosianae."

From such revels and such fooling Field often went to work next day without an hour's sleep.

While in Kansas City Field wrote that pathetic tale of misplaced confidence that records the fate of "Johnny Jones and his sister Sue." It was entitled "The Little Peach" and has had a vogue fully as wide, if not as sentimental, as "Little Boy Blue." Field's own estimate of this production is somewhat bluntly set out in the following note upon a script copy of it made in 1887:

Originally printed in the Kansas City Times, recited publicly by Henry E. Dixey, John A. Mackey, Sol Smith Russell, and almost every comedian in America. Popular but rotten.

The last word is not only harsh but unjust. The variation of the closing exclamation of each verse is as skilful as anything Field ever did. Different, indeed, from the refrain in "Wynken, Blynken and Nod," but touching the chords of mirth with certainty and irresistible effect. Field might have added, that none of the comedians he has named ever gave to the experience of "Johnny Jones and His Sister Sue" in public recitation the same melancholy humor and pathetic conclusion as did the author of their misfortunes and untimely end himself. As a penance, perhaps, for the injustice done to "The Little Peach" in the quoted comment, Field spent several days in 1887 in translating it, so to speak, into Greek characters, in which it appears in the volume given to Mrs. Thompson, which is herewith reproduced in facsimile as a specimen of one of the grotesque fancies Field indulged:



For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Greek characters, I have retranslated this poem into corresponding English, which the reader can compare with his version of "The Little Peach."

_THE PEAR

(In English Equivalent.)

A little pear in a garden grue A little pear of emerald 'ue Kissed bi the sun and bathed bi the due, It grew.

One da, going that garden thro' That little pear kame to the fue Of Thomas Smith and 'is sister Sue Those tou!

Up at the pear a klub tha thrue Down from the stem on uikh it grue Fell the little pear of emerald 'ue Peek-a-boo!

Tom took a bite and Sue took one too And then the trouble began to brue Trouble the doktors kouldn't subdue Too true (paragorik too?).

Under the turf fare the daisies grue They planted Tom and 'is sister Sue And their little souls to the angels flue Boo 'oo!

But as to the pear of emerald 'ue Kissed bi the sun and bathed bi the due I'll add that its mission on earth is thro' Adieu._



CHAPTER IX

IN DENVER, 1881-1883

It was in Denver that Eugene Field entered upon and completed the final stage of what may be called the hobble-de-hoy period in his life and literary career. He went to the capital of Colorado the most indefatigable merry-maker that ever turned night into day, a past-master in the art of mimicry, the most inveterate practical joker that ever violated the proprieties of friendship, time, and occasion to raise a laugh or puncture a fraud. As his friend of those days, E.D. Cowen, has written, "as a farceur and entertainer no professional could surpass him."