Field was tempted to go to Denver by the offer of the managing editorship of the Tribune, which was owned and controlled by the railroad and political coalition then dominant in Colorado. It was run on a scale of extravagance out of all proportion to its legitimate revenue, its newspaper functions being altogether subordinate to services as a railroad ally and political organ. The late O.H. Rothacker, one of the ablest and most versatile writers in the country, was at the head of its editorial staff, and Fred J.V. Skiff, now head of the Field Columbian Museum, was its business manager. These men, with Field, were given carte blanche to surround themselves with a staff and news-gathering equipment to make the Tribune "hum." And they did make it hum, so that the humming was heard far beyond the borders of the centennial state.

In studying the character of Eugene Field and his doings in Denver, it must be borne in mind that we are considering a period in the life of that city years ago, when the conditions were very different from those prevailing there now or from those to be met with to-day in any other large city in the country. Denver in 1881 was very much what San Francisco was under the influence of the gold rush of the early fifties, only complicated with the struggles of rival railway companies. All the politics, railway, and mining interests of the newly created state centred in Denver. The city was alive with the throbbing energy of strife and speculation over mines, railway grants, and political power. Life was rapid, boisterous, and rough. Nothing had settled into the conventional grooves of habit. The whole community was fearless in its gayety. It had not learned to affect the sobriety and demureness of stupidity lest its frivolity should be likened to the crackling of thorns under a pot.

Into this civilization of the mining camp and smelter, just emerging into that of the railway, political, and financial centre of a vast and wealthy territory, came Eugene Field at the age of thirty-one, as free from care, warm-hearted, and open-handed as the most reckless adventurer in Colorado. Although a husband and a father, devoted as ever to his family, he threw himself into the bohemian life of Denver with the abandon of a youth of twenty. It is almost inconceivable where Field found the time and strength for the whirl of work and play in which there was no let up during his two years' stay in Denver. His duties as managing editor of the Tribune would have taxed the energies and resources of the strongest man, for he did not spare himself to fulfil the purpose of his engagement—to make the paper "hum." He mapped out and directed the work of the staff with a comprehensive shrewdness and keen appreciation of what his public, as well as his employers, wanted that left no room for criticism. He kept the whole city guessing what sensation or reputation would be exploded next in the Tribune.

But he did not confine himself to the duties of directing the work of others. He started a column headed "Odds and Ends," to which he was the principal and, by all odds, the most frequent contributor. He had not been in the city many months before he began the occasional publication of those skits which, under the title of "The Tribune Primer," were gathered into his first unpretentious book of forty-eight pages, and which in its original form is now one of the most sought after quarries of the American bibliomaniac. Writing of these sketches in 1894, he said:

The little sketches appeared in the Denver Tribune in the Fall of 1881 and winter of 1882. The whole number did not exceed fifty. I quit writing them because all the other newspapers in the country began imitating the project.

In fact the series began October 10th, 1881, and ended December 19th of the same year. Edward B. Morgan, of Denver, in an introductory note to a few of the sketches omitted from the original "Tribune Primer," printed in the Cornhill Booklet for January, 1901, gives the following version of how the skits began:

Of the origin of these sketches a story is told—although the writer cannot vouch for it—that on the Sunday evening preceding their first publication the "printer's devil" was dispatched post-haste to Field's home for copy which his happy-go-lucky manner of working had not produced. We may perhaps picture him engaged in what was always nearest and dearest to his heart, the amusement of his children, and perhaps reading to them or more likely composing for them primer sketches which he on the spur of the moment parodied for older readers. He has probably expressed his own feelings in the third one of the skits which he then wrote:

THE REPORTER ON SUNDAY

Is this Sunday? Yes, it is a Sunday. How peaceful and quiet it is. But who is the man? He does not look peaceful. He is a reporter and he is swearing. What makes him swear? Because he has to work on Sunday? Oh no! he is swearing because he has to Break the Fourth Commandment. It is a sad thing to be a Reporter.

According to Mr. Cowen, however, the inspiration of the primer compositions was a libel suit brought against the Tribune by Governor Evans. In ridiculing the governor and his action Field three times used the old primer method—with illustrations after the fashion of John Phoenix—and the success of these little sarcasms undoubtedly encouraged him to elaborate the idea. Field also had a column of unsigned verse and storyettes in the Tribune under the heading, "For the Little Folks."

Mr. Morgan discredits Field's statement that the whole number of the Primers issued did not exceed fifty, because of the unlikelihood of printing such a small edition of a book to be sold for twenty-five cents and advertising it daily a month in advance, with a foot-note, "Trade supplied at Special Rates." Which merely shows that Mr. Morgan applied to Field's acts the same rule of thumb that would be applicable to ninety-nine out of a hundred reasonable publishers. But Field was a rule unto himself, and he could be counted on to be the one hundredth and unique individual where the other ninety-and-nine were orthodox and conventional. The fact that only seven or eight copies of the original Primer are known to book collectors tends to confirm Field's statement, which receives side light and support from his suggestion to Francis Wilson that the first edition of "Echoes from the Sabine Farm," which Mr. Wilson issued in such sumptuous form nearly ten years later, should consist of only fifty copies, and that each of the two should reserve one and that they should "burn the other forty-eight."

I have not the slightest doubt that the same disposition was made of all copies of "The Tribune Primer" over the first fifty, which were supplied to the favored few at "Special Rates." This was just such a freak as would have occurred to Field, and in Denver there was no restraint upon the act following upon any wild thought that flitted through his topsy-turvy brain.

The jocose spirit in which Field at this time viewed the methods, duties, and responsibilities of journalism may be gleaned from the following specimens taken at random from his "Tribune Primer" sketches:

THE REPORTER

What is that I see? That, my Child, is the News Interviewer and he is now interviewing a Man. But where is the Man? I can see no Man. The Man, my Child, is in his Mind.

A RECHERCHE AFFAIR

This is a recherche Affair. Recherche Affairs are sometimes met with in Parlors and Ball Rooms. But more Generally in the Society Department of newspapers. A Recherche Affair is an Affair where the Society Editor is invited to the refreshment table. When the Society Editor is told his Room is Better than his Company, the Affair is not Recherche.

THE STEAM PRESS

Is this not a Beautiful Steam Press? The Steam is Lying Down on the Floor taking a Nap. He came from Africa and is Seventy Years Old. The Press prints Papers. It can Print Nine Hundred papera an Hour. It takes One Hour and Forty Minutes to Print the Edition of the Paper. The Paper has a circulation of Thirty-seven thousand. The business Manager says so.

It was indeed a happy departure from the ruder fooling of the newspaper paragrapher of that day to clothe satire on current events and every-day affairs in the innocent simplicity of the nursery. But the vast majority of these Primer paragraphs were by no means as innocent as those quoted. Many of them had a sting more sharp than that of the wasp embalmed in one of them:

See the Wasp. He has pretty yellow stripes around his Body, and a darning needle in his tail. If you will Pat the Wasp upon the Tail, we will Give you a nice Picture Book.

Very many of them seemed inspired by an irrepressible desire to incite little children to deeds of mischief never dreamed of in Baxter's Saints' Rest. Here are a precious pair of paragraphs, each calculated to bring the joy that takes its meals standing into any home circle where youthful incorrigibles were in need of outside encouragement to their infant initiative:

THE NASTY TOBACCO

What is that Nasty looking object? It is a Chew of Tobacco. Oh, how naughty it is to use the Filthy weed. It makes the teeth black, and spoils the Parlor Carpet. Go Quick and Throw the Horrid Stuff Away. Put it in the Ice Cream Freezer or in the Coffee Pot where Nobody can see it. Little Girls you should never chew Tobacco.

THE MUCILAGE

The Bottle is full of Mucilage. Take it and Pour some Mucilage into Papa's Slippers. Then when Papa comes Home it will be a Question whether there will be more Stick in the Slippers than on your Pants.

But whoever wishes to learn of the peculiar side of Child life that appealed most strongly to Eugene Field when his own earlier born children were still in the nursery age, should get a copy of "The Tribune Primer" and read, not only the sketches themselves, but between the lines, where he will find much of the teasing spirit that kept his whole household wondering what he would do next. In these sketches will be found frequent references to the Bugaboo, a creation of his fancy, "With a big Voice like a Bear, and Claws as long as a Knife." His warning to the little children then was, "If you are Good, Beware of the Bugaboo." In later life he reserved the terror of the Bugaboo for naughty little boys and girls.

His first poem to his favorite hobgoblin, as it appeared in the Denver Tribune, was the following:

_THE AWFUL BUGABOO

There was an awful Bugaboo Whose Eyes were Red and Hair was Blue; His Teeth were Long and Sharp and White And he went prowling 'round at Night.

A little Girl was Tucked in Bed, A pretty Night Cap on her Head; Her Mamma heard her Pleading Say, "Oh, do not Take the Lamp away!"

But Mamma took away the lamp And oh, the Room was Dark and Damp; The Little Girl was Scared to Death— She did not Dare to Draw her Breath.

And all at once the Bugaboo Came Rattling down the Chimney Flue; He Perched upon the little Bed And scratched the Girl until she bled.

He drank the Blood and Scratched again— The little Girl cried out in vain— He picked her up and Off he Flew— This Naughty, Naughty Bugaboo!

So, children when in Bed to-night, Don't let them Take away the Light, Or else the Awful Bugaboo May come and Fly away with You._

It is a far cry in time and a farther one in literary worth from "The Awful Bugaboo" of 1883 to "Seein' Things" of 1894. The sex of the victim is different, and the spirit of the incorrigible western tease gives way to the spirit of Puritanic superstition, but there can be no mistaking the persistence of the Bugaboo germ in the later verse:

An' yet I hate to go to bed, For when I'm tucked up warm an' snug an' when my prayers are said, Mother tells me "Happy Dreams!" and takes away the light, An' leaves me lyin' all alone an' seein' things at night!

* * * * *

Sometimes they are as black as ink, an' other times they're white— But the color ain't no difference when you're seein' things at night.

In all that Field wrote, whether in prose or rhyme, for the Denver Tribune nothing contributed to his literary reputation or gave promise of the place in American letters he was to attain, save one little bit of fugitive verse, which was for years to justify its title of "The Wanderer." It contains one of the prettiest, tenderest, most vitally poetic ideas that ever occurred to Eugene Field. And yet he deliberately disclaimed it in the moment of its conception and laid it, like a little foundling, at the door of Madame Modjeska. The expatriation of the Polish actress, between whom and Field there existed a singularly warm and enduring friendship, formed the basis for the allegory of the shell on the mountain, and doubtless suggested to him the humor, if not the sentiment, of attributing the poem to her and writing it in the first person. The circumstances of its publication justify its reproduction here, although I suppose it is one of the most familiar of Field's poems. I copy it from his manuscript:

_THE WANDERER

Upon a mountain height, far from the sea, I found a shell, And to my listening ear this lonely thing Ever a song of ocean seem'd to sing— Ever a tale of ocean seem'd to tell.

How came the shell upon the mountain height? Ah, who can say Whether there dropped by some too careless hand— Whether there cast when oceans swept the land, Ere the Eternal had ordained the day?

Strange, was it not? Far from its native deep, One song it sang; Sang of the awful mysteries of the tide, Sang of the restless sea, profound and wide— Ever with echoes of the ocean rang.

And as the shell upon the mountain height Sang of the sea, So do I ever, leagues and leagues away— So do I ever, wandering where I may, Sing, O my home! sing, O my home! of thee!_

I have seen it stated that Madame Modjeska regarded the liberty taken with her name in this connection with feelings of displeasure, and Hamlin Garland has reported a conversation with Field, during the summer of 1893, when the latter, speaking of his work in Denver, and of "The Tribune Primer" as the most conspicuous thing he did there, said: "The other thing which rose above the level of my ordinary work was a bit of verse, 'The Wanderer,' which I credited to Modjeska, and which has given her no little annoyance." In his note to Mrs. Thompson's manuscript copy of "The Wanderer," Field says:

These verses appeared in the Denver Tribune credited to Helena Modjeska. They were copied far and wide over Modjeska's name. Modjeska took the joke in pretty good part. The original publication was June, 1883.

Madame Modjeska not only took the joke in "pretty good part," but esteemed its perpetrator all the more highly for the light in which it placed her before the public, which she was then delighting with her exquisite impersonations of Rosalind and Mary Stuart. For years after its publication Madame Modjeska, wherever she appeared throughout the country, was reminded of this joke by the scores of letters sent to her room, as soon as she registered, requesting autograph copies of "The Wanderer," or the honor of her signature to a clipping of it neatly pasted in the autograph hunter's album. Nor were autograph hunters the only ones imposed on by the signature to "The Wanderer." In August, 1883, Professor David Swing, writing in the Weekly Magazine, gave it as his opinion that the alleged Modjeska poem was indeed written by Modjeska, and concluded: "The conversation and tone of her thoughts as expressed among friends betrays a mind that at least loves the poetic, and is quite liable to attempt a verse. The child-like simplicity of this little song is so like Modjeska that no demand arises for any outside help in the matter." And Field, like the true fisherman he was, having secured a fine rise, proceeded to remark: "It will, perhaps, pain the Professor to learn that Madame Modjeska now denies ever having seen the verses until they appeared in print."

But not until Field reclaimed his child and published "The Wanderer" as his own, in "A Little Book of Western Verse," was the verse-reading public satisfied to give the Polish comedienne a long rest from importunities concerning it.



CHAPTER X

ANECDOTES OF LIFE IN DENVER

No story of Eugene Field's life would be true, no study of his personality complete, if it ignored or even glossed over "the mad wild ways of his youthful days" in Denver. He never wearied of telling of the constant succession of harum-scarum pranks that made the Tribune office the storm-centre for all the fun-loving characters in Colorado. Not that Field ever neglected his work or his domestic duties for play, but it was a dull day for Denver when his pen or his restless spirit for mischief did not provide some fresh cause for local amazement or merriment. His associates and abettors in all manner of frolics, where he was master of the revels, were kindred spirits among the railway managers, agents, politicians, mining speculators, lawyers, and doctors of the town. Into this company a fresh ingredient would be introduced every week from the theatrical troupes which made Denver the western limit of their circuits or a convenient break in the long overland jump.

Field's office was a fitting retreat for the genius of disorder. It had none of the conveniences that are supposed to be necessary in the rooms of modern managing editors. It was open and accessible to the public without the intermediary of an office-boy or printer's devil. Field had his own way of making visitors welcome, whether they came in friendly guise or on hostile measures bent. Over his desk hung the inhospitable sign, "This is my busy day," which he is said to have invented, and on the neighboring wall the motto, "God bless our proof-reader, He can't call for him too soon." But his crudest device, "fatal," as his friend E.D. Cowen writes, "to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless black-walnut chair." Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few exchanges carelessly thrown there—the floor being also liberally strewn with them. As it was the only chair in the room except the one Field occupied himself, his caller, though never asked to do so, would be sure to see in Field's suave smile an invitation to drop into the trap and thence ingloriously to the floor. Through this famous chair, on his first visit to the Tribune office, "Bill" Nye dropped into a lifelong friendship with Eugene Field. When the victim happened to be an angry sufferer from a too personal reference to his affairs in the paper, Field would make the most profuse apologies for the scant furnishings of the office, which he shrewdly ascribed to the poverty of the publishing company, and tender his own chair as some small compensation for the mishap.

I have spoken of Edgar W.—more familiarly known as "Bill"—Nye's unceremonious introduction to Field's friendship. This followed upon what was virtually the discovery of Nye by Field. The former was what old-time printers described as "plugging along" without recognition on the Laramie Boomerang. His peculiar humor caught the attention of Field, who, with the intuition of a born journalist, wrote and got Nye to contribute a weekly letter to the Tribune. At first Nye was paid the princely stipend of $5 a week for these letters. This was raised to $10, and when Field informed Nye that he was to receive $15 per letter, the latter promptly packed his grip and took the first train for Denver, to see what sort of a newspaper Croesus presided over the order-blank of the Tribune. When he appeared before Field he was whiskered like a western farmer and his head had not pushed its way through a thick growth of hair. He was altogether a different looking personage from the bald-headed, clean-shaven humorist with whose features the world was destined to become so well acquainted.

After the incident of the chair nothing would do Field but a dinner at the St. James Hotel, given in honor of Bill Nye. The affair started after the Tribune had gone to press and lasted all night. At five o'clock in the morning the company escorted their guest to his room and departed, with elaborate professions of good-will. They waited in the hotel office long enough for Nye to get to bed, and then sent up cards, requesting his presence down-stairs on immediate business. But Nye was equal to his tormentors, and the bell-boy returned, bearing a shot-gun, with the message that it would speak for him. When Nye first visited Field in Chicago, his presence in town was heralded with the following paragraph:

The latest news from Bill Nye is to the effect that he has discovered a coal mine on his little farm near Hudson, Wis. Ten days ago he was spading over his garden—an exercise recommended by his physician—and he struck a very rich vein of what is called rock coal. Nye paid $2,000 for this farm, and since the development of this coal deposit on the premises he has been offered $10,000 for five acres. He believes that he has a great fortune within his grasp.

As illustrative of how impossible it was for Field to keep money, it is related that on one occasion he coaxed F.J.V. Skiff, then business manager of the Tribune, to advance "just another" $10 to meet some urgent domestic demands. Scarcely had Mr. Skiff time to place the order in the cash drawer, ere Field stood before him once more, pleading in forma pauperis for "another X." He was asked what had become of the ten he had just received.

"Just my luck, Fred," Field replied. "As I was leaving the office whom should I meet but one of my old printer boys, dead broke. The X was all I had, and he told me he had to have it, and he had to." It is needless to say that Field got the second advance and succeeded in dodging all impecunious "old boys" on the way home.

I have said that Denver at that time was the centre of all the railway interests of Colorado and the far West. Being also the capital, it was the place where legislators and railway agents wrestled with problems of regulating tariffs and granting privileges to what may be called their mutual benefit. It was from his experience in Denver that Field learned that two-thirds of the business of a western legislature consisted in causing legislative hold-ups, of which the transportation companies were the victims, and the most vociferously impeccable statesmen the chief beneficiaries. The secret service funds of the railway companies doing business in Colorado paid out a hundred dollars for protection from notorious sandbagging bills and resolutions to every dollar they spent for special favors in grants and franchises.

This by way of preface to a story in which Eugene Field and a railway official, who, as I write, holds a high position in the transportation world, figure. This official was at that time the superintendent of the Southwestern Division of the Pullman system, with head-quarters at St. Louis. In those days every session of the Colorado legislature saw its anti-Pullman rate reduction bill, which Wickersham, as I shall call him, because that is not his name, was commissioned to checkmate, strangle, or make away with in committee by the aid of annual passes, champagne, and the mysterious potency of the national bank-note. As was remarked by E.D. Cowen, to whose notes I am indebted for refreshing my memory of Field's tales, Wickersham never failed in generalship, principally because he was bold in his methods and picturesquely lavish with his munitions of war. The Pullman Company did not then enjoy the royalty and defensive alliance which now protects it against rate legislation throughout the West, and so Wickersham was kept continually on the go, making alliances and friendships among legislators and journalists against the days of reckoning.

Field, as the managing editor of the Tribune, was a special favorite with Wickersham, as he was of every professional and commercial visitor having an axe to grind at the capital of the state. Pullman's representative had the wit to appreciate Field, both for his personal qualities and the assistance he could render through the columns of the newspaper. Field reciprocated the personal friendship, but, so far as the Tribune was concerned, took a grim satisfaction in giving Wickersham to understand that though he could use its freedom he could not abuse it or count upon its aid beyond what was strictly legitimate. Field's stereotyped introduction of Wickersham—one calculated to put him on a pleasant business footing with every practical politician, was "He's a good fellow and a thoroughbred." So his coming was invariably celebrated by a general round-up of all the good fellows in Denver, and his departure left the aching heads and parched recollections that from the days of Noah have distinguished the morning after.

After one of Wickersham's calls, Field determined that the sobriety and severe morality of Denver were being scandalized by these periodical visitations, and he issued orders to the Tribune staff that when next the "good fellow and thoroughbred" appeared on the scene he should be given a wide berth, or, as Field put it, should be left to "play a lone hand in his game." So when Wickersham next swung around the legislative circle to Denver, not a man about the editorial rooms would go out with him, listen to his stories, accept a cigar at his hands, or associate with him in any of the ways that had been their cheerful wont. The coldness and loneliness of the situation excited Wickersham's thirst for revenge and also for what is known as the wine of Kentucky. Having succeeded in getting up a full head of steam, he started out for an explanation or a counter demonstration. Arriving at the Tribune office, when the desks were vacated at the evening dinner-hour, he interpreted it as a further affront and challenge, which he proceeded to answer by destroying every last scrap of copy in sight for the morrow's paper. He then converted himself into a small cyclone, and went through every desk, strewed their litter on the floor, broke all the pens and pencils, and, in the language of an eye-witness, "ended by toning the picture of editorial desolation with the violet contents of all the ink bottles he could find."

Then he retired in hilarious satisfaction from the scene of devastation he had made. Consternation reigned in that office until Field returned, when he quickly dispelled the gloom with a promise of revenge, and set the staff at work to patch up the ruin the envious Wickersham had made. But they were not permitted to do this in peace, for their enemy, returning in the dark of night, bombarded the windows of the editorial rooms with the staves of old ash-barrels he had found conveniently by.

While Wickersham was engaged in this second assault, with windows smashing to right of them and to left of them, with glass falling all around them, and the staves of old ash-barrels playing a devil's tattoo about them, the devoted band of editors, reporters, and copy-readers worked nobly on. They had confidence in their leader that their hour would come. Their first duty was to get out the paper. After that they looked for the deluge.

When Wickersham had expended his last stave and fiercest epithet on the shattered windows he retired in bad order to his apartments at the St. James Hotel.

Now began Field's revenge, planned with due deliberation and executed with malicious thoroughness. He first sent for "'Possum Jim," an aged and very serious colored man, who worshipped "Mistah Fiel'" because of the sympathy Eugene never withheld from the dark-skinned children of the race. "'Possum Jim" spent most of his existence on the same street corner, waiting for a job, which invariably had to come to him. His outfit consisted of an express wagon strung together with telegraph wire, and a nondescript four-footed creature that once bore the similitude of a horse. Whenever Field had an odd job to be done about his household he would go out of his way to let "old 'Possum Jim" earn the quarter—partly to do an act of kindness to "Jim," but chiefly to tease Mrs. Field by the appearance of the broken-down equipage lingering in front of their dwelling.

Just before the Tribune went to press, a sergeant of police called on Field in response to a summons by telephone. After a whispered conference he left, with a broad smile struggling under his curling mustache. In company with a number of his staff Field next made the round of the all-night haunts and gathered to his aid as fine a collection of bohemian "thoroughbreds" as ever made the revels of Mardi Gras look like a Sunday-school convention. He installed them at the resort of a Kentucky gentleman named Jones, opposite the St. James. As one who was there reports, "The amber milk of the Blue-grass cow flowed in plenty." Bidding his associates await his return, Field, armed with a single bottle, crossed the street to the hotel in search of the enemy.

For half, an hour they waited, in growing fear that Wickersham had retired for the night, with orders the night clerk dared not disobey, that he was not to be disturbed, even if the hotel was on fire. Just as expectation had grown heavy-eyed, Field appeared crossing the street with Wickersham on his arm, very happy, more of a good fellow than ever and more than ever ready for red-eyed anarchy of any sort.

"After a swift hour"—I quote from one who was there and whose account tallies with Field's own—"and as the morning opened out Field insisted on breaking for sunlight and fresh air. Wickersham was always a leader, even in the matter of making a noise. He sang; everyone else applauded. He shrieked and shouted; all approved. Windows went up across the way in the hotel, and night-capped heads protruded to investigate. The frantic din of the electric-bells could be heard. The clerk appeared to protest." What attention might have been paid to his protest will never be known, for just then "'Possum Jim's" gothic steed and rattletrap cart rounded the corner.

"I say, old man," shouted Field, "we want your rig for an hour; what's it worth?"

Jim played his part slyly, and the bargain was finally struck for $2.50, the owner to present no claim for possible damages. Wickersham was so delighted with the shrewdness of the deal that he insisted on paying the bill. The horse, which could scarcely stand on his four corners, was quickly unharnessed and hitched to a telegraph pole, and before he realized what the madcaps were about, Wickersham was himself harnessed into the shafts. The novelty of his position suited his mood. He pranced and snorted, and pawed the ground and whinnied, and played horse in fine fettle until the word go. Field, with a companion beside him, held the reins and cracked the whip. The others helped the thoroughbred in harness the best they could by pushing.

In this manner, and all yelling like Comanche Indians, twice they made the circuit of the block. All the guests in front of the big hotel were leaning out of the windows, when the police sergeant popped in sight with a squad of four men. Field, who had been duly apprised of their approach, gave the signal, and the crowd, making good their retreat to Jones's, abandoned Wickersham to his fate. He was quickly, but roughly, disentangled from the intricacies of "'Possum Jim's" rope-yarn harness. The more he protested and expostulated, the more inexorable became the five big custodians of the outraged peace, until the last word of remonstrance and explanation died upon his well-nigh breathless lips. Then he tried cajoling and "connudling" and those silent, persuasive arts so often efficacious in legislative lobbies; but there were too many witnesses to his crime, and bribes were not in order.

When at last Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion, sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the prisoner into Jones's resort.

A quarter of an hour later the police squad made its exit by the back door, and less than an hour afterward Wickersham's special was bearing him southward toward Texas.

But Field's revenge was not fully sated yet. He caused a $2 Pullman rate-bill, making a sixty per cent. reduction, to be prepared in the Tribune office, and secured its introduction in the legislature by the chairman of the House committee on railways. The news was immediately flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation. Never was a "good fellow and a thoroughbred" so mercilessly scarified.

For the remaining six weeks of the session Wickersham did not leave Denver, nor did he dare look at the Tribune until after breakfast. Every member of the legislature received a Pullman annual. Champagne flowed, not by the bottle, but by the dray-load. Wickersham begged for quarter, but his appeals fell like music on ears that heard but heeded not. Nor did he find out that the whole affair was a put-up job until the bill was finally lost in the Senate committee.

One of the familiar stories of Field's rollicking life in Denver was at the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to America. As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height. Anticipating Wilde's appearance in Denver by one day, and making shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his project, Field secured the finest landau in town and was driven through the streets in a caricature verisimilitude of the poet of the sunflower and the flowing hair.

The impersonation of Wilde a la Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan's opera, "Patience," was well calculated to deceive all who were not in the secret. Field's talent as a farceur and a mimic enabled him to assume and carry out the expression of bored listlessness which was the popular idea of the leader of aesthetes. Nobody in the curious, whooping, yelling crowd assembled along the well-advertised route suspected the delusion, and after an hour's parade Field succeeded in making his exit from public gaze without betraying his identity.

When Wilde turned up the next day he was not a little mystified to learn that he had created a sensation driving around Denver in the raiments of Bunthorne, while in reality travelling over the prairie in a palace-car. It was Field himself who relieved his curiosity with a highly amusing narrative of the experience of the joker lounging in the seat of honor in the landau.

Wilde, it is related, saw nothing funny in the affair, nor was he provoked at it. His only comment was, "What a splendid advertisement for my lecture."

It was while in Denver that Field had numerous and flattering offers to leave journalism for the stage, and more than once he was sorely tempted to make the experiment. In the natural qualifications for the theatrical profession he was most richly endowed. In the arts of mimicry he had no superior. He had the adaptable face of a comedian, was a matchless raconteur, and a fine vocalist. At a banquet or in a parlor he was an entertainer of truly fascinating parts. During his life in St. Louis and Kansas City his inclination had led him to seek the society of the green-room, and in Denver his position enlarged the circle of his acquaintance with the theatrical profession, until it embraced almost every prominent actor and actress in America, and was subsequently extended to include the more celebrated artists of England. Among his favorites was Madame Bernhardt, whose several visits to the United States afforded him an opportunity for some of the most entertaining sketches that ever delighted his Chicago readers. None of these contained more pith in little than that brief paragraph with which he opened his column one day, to the effect that "An empty cab drove up to the stage-door of the Columbia Theatre last night, from which Madame Bernhardt alighted."

Among the celebrities who visited Denver while Field was in what he would have called his perihelion was Miss Kate Field, with whose name he took all the liberties of a brother, although there was no blood relationship between them thicker than the leaves of a genealogical compendium. He took especial pains to circulate the report through all the West that Miss Field had brought a sitz-bath with her to alleviate the dust and hardships of travel in the "Woolly West," where, as he represented, she thought running water was a luxury and stationary bath-tubs were unknown. But he atoned for this by one of the daintiest pleasantries that ever occurred to his playful mind. When Miss Field was preparing for her lecture tour in Mormon land she started an inquisitive correspondence with her namesake, whose Tribune Primer was then spreading his fame through the exchanges. The two soon discovered that they were cousins, no matter how many times removed, but near enough to inspire Field to entrust a letter to Uncle Sam's mail addressed thus:

A maiden fair of untold age Seeks to adorn our Western stage; How foolish of her, yet how nice To write me, asking my advice! New York's the city where you'll find This prodigy of female kind; Hotel Victoria's the place Where you'll see her smiling face. I pray thee, postman, bear away This missive to her, sans delay. These lines enclosed are writ by me— A Field am I, a Field is she. Two very fertile fields I ween, In constant bloom, yet never green, She is my cousin; happy fate That gave me such a Cousin Kate.

From Denver to New York this pretty conceit carried the epistle just as safely and directly as if it had borne the most prosaic superscription the postal authorities could exact, and I venture to say that it was handled with a smiling solicitude never bestowed on the humdrum epistles that travel neither faster nor surer for being marked "important and immediate." This was before Field had formed the habit of illuminating everything he wrote with colored inks, or the missive to his Cousin Kate would have expressed his variegated fancies in all the colors of the rainbow, especially red.

In a short sketch, entitled "Eugene Field in Denver," Wolfe Londoner speaks of his friend as a "bright ray of laughing sunshine across this shadowy vale, a mine of sentiment and charity, an avalanche of fun and happiness," but one who "never in all the run of his merry, joyous career was known to wake up with a cent." Why?

Here is the explanation given by Mr. Londoner, who was familiar with every phase of Eugene Field's life in Denver:

"The course of one short day was ever long enough to drain his open purse, and his boon companions were as welcome to its contents, while it could stand the strain, as its careless, happy owner. The bright side of life attracted his laughing fancy, and with stern and unalterable determination he studiously avoided all seriousness and shadow. There was no room in his happy composition for aught of sorrow or sadness, and a quick and merry wit always extricated him from every embarrassing position or perplexing dilemma."

Mr. Londoner rightly says that an inert Eugene Field was an impossibility, and at that time he was only supremely happy when busily engaged in playing some practical joke on his ever-suspecting but never sufficiently wary friends. Of course Mr. Londoner himself was victimized, and more than once. During one campaign, as chairman of the Republican County Central Committee, Mr. Londoner was delegated to work up enthusiasm among the colored voters of Denver, and in an unguarded moment he took Field into his confidence and boasted of his flattering progress. The next morning the following advertisement, displayed with all the prominence of glaring scare-heads, appeared:

WANTED!!

EVERY COLORED MAN IN THE CITY.

To call at Wolfe Londoner's Store. A Car load of Georgia Watermelons Just received For a special distribution Among his Colored Friends. Call Early and get Your Melon!!!

It is needless to say that when Mr. Londoner's store opened in the morning an ever-increasing cloud of dusky humanity, with teeth that glistened with the juice of anticipation, gathered about the entrance. Business in the store was at a standstill and travel on the street was blocked. No explanation could appease the rising anger of that dark multitude. It was melons, or a riot. Melons, or that unheard-of thing—a colored landslide to the democracy. Mr. Londoner was at his wits' ends. There were no melons in the market, and none expected. Just as Londoner was preparing to abandon his store to the wrath of the justly incensed melon-maniacs, a car-load of magnificent melons dropped into one of the freight sidings, and Londoner and the Republican party were saved. Nobody ever knew how or whence that pink-hearted manna came. The price was exorbitant, but that did not matter. Londoner paid it with the air of a man who had ordered melons and was indignant that the railway company had disappointed him in not delivering them the day before. There was not a crack in the solid black Republican column on election day.

But Field was not through with Mr. Londoner yet. The colored brethren had to hold their ratification meeting to endorse the Republican nominations, and more especially to render thanks for the creation of watermelons, and to the man who paid for them, out of season. Of course Mr. Londoner was invited to attend, and when it came his turn to address the meeting the chairman, a colored deacon of the church where "'Possum Jim" worshipped, by the name of Williams, introduced him as follows:

"I now take great pleasure in introducing to you our friend and brother, the Honorable Mistah Wolfe Londoner, who has always been our true friend and brother, who always advises us to do the right thing, and stands ready, at all times, to help us in the good fight. Although he has a white skin, his heart is as black as any of ours. Brothers, the Honorable Wolfe Londoner."

There was no mistaking the authorship of this felicitous introduction.

Field was never tired of repeating another story at the expense of Mr. Londoner, in connection with the visit of Charles A. Dana to Denver. The arrival of "Mr. Dana of the New York Sun" was made the occasion for one of those receptions by the Press Club which made up in heartiness what they lacked in conventional ceremony. Mr. Londoner was the president of the club, and it not only fell to his lot to deliver the address of welcome to guests of the club, but to look after their comfort and welfare while they remained in the city, and often to provide them with the wherewithal to leave it. On Mr. Dana's presentation he was called on for some remarks, to which Mr. Londoner listened with the air of a man who had heard the same tale from lips less entitled to deliver a message of counsel and warning to a group of newspaper writers. When his guest had finished his remarks, Mr. Londoner, according to Field's story, walked over to Mr. Dana and asked him how much he wanted.

Mr. Dana looked at him with a puzzled air, and asked: "How much what? What do you mean?"

"Why, money," Mr. Londoner is said to have replied. "Every newspaper man who ever came to this club was introduced the same as you were, made a speech the same as you did, and then came to me to borrow money to get out of town with. Now, how much do you want?"

According to Field, he never saw a man so greatly relieved as Mr. Londoner was when Mr. Dana assured him that his hotel bill was paid and he had enough money sewed into his waistcoat to carry him back to New York, where he had a job waiting for him.

On one occasion Field accompanied the Denver Press Club on a pleasure trip to Manitou, a summer resort that nestles in a canon at the base of Mount Rosa. Before the party was comfortably settled in the hotel, Field was approached by a poor woman who had lost her husband, and who poured into his ear a sad tale of indigence and sorrow. He became immediately interested, and at once set about devising means for her relief. As his purse was as lean as her own and his companions were not overburdened with the means to get back to Denver, he announced a grand musical and dramatic entertainment, to be given in the parlors of the hotel that evening, for the benefit of a deserving charity. Every guest in the hotel was invited, and the members of the Press Club spread the notices among the citizens of the village. When asked who would be the performers, Field answered, with the utmost nonchalance, that the Lord would provide the entertainment if Manitou would furnish the audience. The evening came, and the parlors were crowded with guests and villagers, but no performers. After waiting until expectancy and curiosity had almost toppled over from tiptoe to disgust and indignation, Field stepped to the piano with preternatural gravity and attacked it with all the grand airs of a foreign virtuoso. Critics would have denied that Field was a pianist, and, technically considered, they would have been right. But his fingers had a fondness for the ivory keys, and they responded to his touch with the sweet melody of the forest to the wind. He carried all the favorite airs of all the operas he had ever heard in his fingers' ends. He knew the popular songs of the day by heart, and, where memory failed, could improvise. He had a voice for the soft and deep chords of negro melodies I have never heard surpassed, and with all, he had a command of comedy and pathos which, up to this time, was little known beyond the circle in Denver over which he reigned as the Lord of Misrule. That night in Manitou those who were present reported that, from the moment he sat down at the piano until the last note of the good-night song died away, he held that impromptu audience fascinated by his impromptu performance. By turns he sang, played, recited poetry, mimicked actors and well-known Colorado characters, told anecdotes, and altogether gave such a single-handed entertainment that the spectators did not know whether to be more astonished at its variety or delighted with its genius. The result was a generous collection, which went far to relieve the distress of the woman who had touched Field's sympathy.

Let it not be understood that nothing more serious than some hilarious escapade or sardonic bit of humor ever crossed the life of Eugene Field in Denver. His innate hatred of humbug and sham made the Denver Tribune a terror to all public characters who considered that suddenly acquired wealth gave them a free hand to flaunt ostentatious vulgarity on all public occasions.



CHAPTER XI

COMING TO CHICAGO

What I have written thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife through every newspaper office and green-room in the United States. No one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field, of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of the western press.

And it came near ending, like the candle exposed to the gusts of March, or a bubble that has danced and glistened its brief moment in the sun. The boy who was too delicate for continued application to books in Amherst, who had outgrown his strength so that his entrance at Williams was postponed a year, whose backwardness at his books through three colleges had been excused on the plea of ill-health, had been living a pace too fast for a never strong and always rebellious stomach. He was not intemperate in eating or drinking. It was not excess in the first that ruined his digestion, nor intemperance in the other that caused him to become a total abstainer from all kinds of intoxicating beverages. He simply became a dyspeptic through a weird devotion to the pieces and pastries "like Mary French used to make," and he became a teetotaler because the doctors mistook the cause of his digestive distress.

The one thing of which Eugene Field was intemperate in Denver was of himself. He gave to that delicate machinery we call the body no rest. It was winter when he did not see the sun rise several times a week, and the hours he stole from daylight for sleep were too few and infrequent to make up for the nights he turned into day for work and frolic. Thus it came about that in the summer of 1883 Eugene Field had reached the end of his physical tether, and some change of scene was necessary to save what was left of an impaired constitution.

From what has been said, it is easy to understand how Field's abilities were diverted into a new and deeper channel in 1883. "Stricken by dyspepsia," writes Mr. Cowen, "so severely that he fell into a state of chronic depression and alarm, he eagerly accepted the timely offer of Melville E. Stone, then surrounding himself with the best talent he could procure in the West, of a virtually independent desk on the Chicago Morning News. There he quickly regained health, although he never recovered from his ailment."

How Mr. Stone came to be the "Fairy Godmother" to Field at this turning-point in his life may be briefly related, and partly in Mr. Stone's own words. He and Victor F. Lawson had made a surprising success in establishing the Chicago Daily News, in December, 1875, the first one-cent evening paper in Chicago. It is related that in the early days of their enterprise they had to import the copper coins for the use of their patrons—the nickle being up to that time the smallest coin in use in the West, as the dime, or "short bit," was until a more recent date on the Pacific coast. The Daily News was more distinguished for its enterprise in gathering news and getting it out on the street before the comparative blanket sheets of the early eighties than for its editorial views or literary features.

In January, 1881, Messrs. Lawson & Stone conceived the idea of printing a morning edition of their daily, to be called the Morning News. As it was to be sold for two cents, it was their purpose to make it better worth the price by a more exacting standard in the manner of presenting its news and by the employment of special writers for its editorial page. Just then, however, the crop of unemployed writers of demonstrated ability or reputation was unusually short, and the foundation of the Chicago Herald in May of the same year, by half a dozen energetic journalists of local note, did not tend to overstock the market with the talent sought for by Messrs. Lawson & Stone. It was the rivalry between the Morning News (afterwards the Record) and the Herald, that sent Mr. Stone so far afield as Denver for a man to assist him in realizing the idea cherished by him and his associate. An interesting story could be told of that rivalry, which has just ended by the consolidation of the two papers (March, 1901) into the Chicago Record-Herald, but only so much of it as affects the life and movements of Eugene Field concerns us here.

In the early summer of 1883 Mr. Stone, who had been watching with appreciative newspaper sense the popularity of the Tribune Primer skits, cast an acquisitive net in the direction of Denver. He had known Field in St. Louis, and describes their first meeting thus: "I entered the office of the Dispatch to see Stillson Hutchins, the then proprietor of that paper. It was in the forenoon, the busy hour for an afternoon newspaper. A number of people were there, but as to the proprietor, clerks, and customers, none was engaged in any business, for, perched on the front counter, telling in a strangely resonant voice a very funny story, sat Eugene Field. He was a striking figure, tall, gaunt, almost bald (though little more than twenty years of age), smooth shaven, and with a remarkable face, which lent itself to every variety of emotion. In five minutes after our introduction I knew him. There was no reserve about him. He was of the free, whole-souled western type—that type which invites your confidence in return for absolute and unstinted frankness."

Instead of broaching his purpose by letter, Mr. Stone slipped off to Denver for a personal interview with his intended victim, and, as I have already intimated, he arrived just in the nick of time to find Field ready for any move that would take him away from the killing kindness and exhilarating atmosphere of the Colorado capital. "The engagement," says Mr. Stone, "was in itself characteristic. Field wanted to join me. He was tired of Denver and mistrustful of the limitations upon him there. But if he was to make a change, he must be assured that it was to be for his permanent good. He was a newspaper man not from choice, but because in that field he could earn his daily bread. Behind all he was conscious of great capability—not vain or by any means self-sufficient, but certain that by study and endeavor he could take high rank in the literary world and could win a place of lasting distinction. So he stipulated that he should be given a column of his own, that he might stand or fall by the excellence of his own work. Salary was less an object than opportunity."

Mr. Stone gave the necessary assurances, both as to salary—by no means princely—and opportunity as large as Field had the genius to fill. As quickly as he could, Field closed up his Denver connections and prepared for the last move in his newspaper life. How he survived the round of farewell luncheons, dinners, and midnight suppers given for and by him was a source of mingled pride and amusement to the chief sufferer. It was with feelings of genuine regret that he turned his back on Denver and gave up the jovial and congenial association with the Tribune and its staff. Although its chief editorial writer, O.H. Rothacker, had a national reputation, Field was the star of the company that gave to the Tribune its unique reputation among the journals of the West, and all classes of citizens felt that something picturesquely characteristic of the liberty and good-fellowship of their bustling town was being taken from them. Field's departure meant the closing of the hobble-de-hoy period in the life of Denver as well as in his own. His life there had been exactly suited to his temperament, to the times, and to the environment. It is doubtful if it would have been possible to repeat such an experience in Denver five years later, and it is certain that in five years Field had developed whole leagues of character beyond its repetition.

It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his personal effects, except his father's library, moved to Chicago. That library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers. Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead, with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit. Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the literary world and to "win a place of lasting distinction."

When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny" (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke.

Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect:

"The Lord will provide, my father can't!"

The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I don't think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any embarrassing financial condition.

It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement, personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the East. For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary "fellers" out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his merits and "grow up with the country."

The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active political and commercial life. It had been rebuilt, physically, after the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy paying interest and principal to have much time to read books, much less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense. It had already become a great publishing centre, but not of the books that engage the critical intelligence of the public. The feverish devotion of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at an unseasonably early hour, or to places of amusement, from which they went so straight home after the performances that there was not a single fashionable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties after the play. Whether this condition, making theatre-going less expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees of merit. The losses which the best artists and plays almost invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped in Chicago.

Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same reason that it patronized the drama. It sought entertainment and amusement, and grand opera is a serious business. As Field said of himself, Chicago liked music "limited"; and its liking was generally limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible exception of Boston.

I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in 1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most congenial atmosphere and associations when he came hither that year. These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation to the end.

Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed airs of importance, and its township politics. Despite its forty odd years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as such.

Transplanted from the higher altitude at the foot of the Rockies to the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate. Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to 56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the weather vane, as the wind shifted from its long sweep over the prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60 degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:

_CHICAGO IN JULY

The white-capp'd waves of Michigan break On the beach where the jacksnipes croon— The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake And tempers the heat of noon: In yonder bush, where the berries grow, The Peewee tunefully sings, While hither and thither the people go, Attending to matters and things.

There is cool for all in the busy town— For the girls in their sealskin sacques— For the dainty dudes idling up and down, With overcoats on their backs; And the horse-cars lurch and the people run And the bell at the bridgeway rings— But never perspires a single one, Attending to matters and things.

What though the shivering mercury wanes— What though the air be chill? The beauteous Chloe never complains As she roams by the purpling rill; And the torn-tit coos to its gentle mate, As Chloe industriously swings With Daphnis, her beau, on the old front gate, Attending to matters and things.

When the moon comes up, and her cold, pale light Coquettes with the freezing streams, What care these twain for the wintry night, Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams, And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe O'er his fair jack full on kings, But smiles that fortune should bless him so, Attending to matters and things.

CHICAGO IN AUGUST

When Cynthia's father homeward brought An India mull for her to wear, How were her handsome features fraught With radiant smiles beyond compare! And to her bosom Cynthia strained Her pa with many a fond caress— And ere another week had waned That mull was made into a dress.

And Cynthia blooming like a rose Which any swain might joy to cull, Cried "How I'll paralyze the beaux When I put on my India mull!" Now let the heat of August day Be what it may—I'll not complain— I'll wear the mull, and put away This old and faded-out delaine!

Despite her prayers the heated spell Descended not on mead and wold— Instead of turning hot as—well, The weather turned severely cold, The Lake dashed up its icy spray And breathed its chill o'er all the plain— Cynthia stays at home all day And wears the faded-out delaine!

So is Chicago at this time— She stands where icy billows roll— She wears her beauteous head sublime, While cooling zephyrs thrill her soul. But were she tempted to complain, Methinks she'd bid the zephyrs lull, That she might doff her old delaine And don her charming India mull!_

But there was another feature of Chicago that from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a condition in which the motto in hoc signo vinces on a bar of soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a month before his muse began to wield the "knotted lash of sarcasm" above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fashion:

_Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo A beauteous Detroit belle, And for a month—or, maybe, two— He wooed the lovely lady well.

But, oh! one day—one fatal day— As mused the belle with naught to do, A local paper came her way And, drat the luck! she read it through.

She read of alleys black with mire— A river with a putrid breath— Streets reeking with malarial ire— Inviting foul disease and death.

Then, with a livid snort she called Her trembling lover to her side— "How dare you, wretched youth," she bawled, "Ask me to be your blushing bride?

Go back unto your filthy town, And never by my side be seen, Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown, Until you've got your city clean!"_

Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed "Current Gossip" instead of "Odds and Ends." The heading was only a makeshift until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead. On August 31st, 1883, the title "Sharps and Flats" was hoisted to the top of Field's column, and there it remained over everything he wrote for more than a dozen years.

There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this title, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in "An Appreciation" of Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In what, on the whole, is probably the best analysis of Field's genius and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:

"What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at least of the Venusian's character. He could say of his affection for the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation of the eighth of the first book of Horatian Satires:

Not to be tedious or repeat How Flats and Sharps in concert meet.

"Field's knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete, probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft. He made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it. And it is more likely, as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption (Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite classic poet than from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce."

Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of Field's intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace anticipates the period of his Horatian "hobby," as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it, by at least five years. It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm. But that is another story.

According to M.E. Stone, the title of the column which Field established when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of a play, "Sharps and Flats," written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and played with considerable success throughout the United States by Messrs. Robson and Crane.



It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the "Sharps and Flats" column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.

To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholarship, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.

Practically all Field's scholarship and mental equipment, so far as they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago, and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." His domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his death of Eugene Field's home and the beautiful library in which he wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic arrangements for many years before June, 1895—dreams for which he longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best Field wrote previous to 1890—and it includes the best he ever wrote, except "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"—was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's "Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings, but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality of his home life.



CHAPTER XII

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

It was in the month of September, after Field's coming to the Morning News, that a managerial convulsion in the office of the Chicago Herald threw the majority of its editorial corps and special writers across Fifth Avenue into the employ of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. They were at first distributed between the morning and evening editions of the News, my first work being for the latter, to which I contributed editorial paragraphs for one week, when Mr. Stone concluded to make me his chief editorial writer on the Morning News. This brought me into immediate personal and professional relations with Field. Our rooms adjoined, being separated by a board partition that did not reach to the ceiling and over which for four years I was constantly bombarded with missives and missiles from my ever-restless neighbor. Among the other recruits from the Herald at that time was John F. Ballantyne, who, from being the managing editor of that paper, was transferred to the position of chief executive of the Morning News under Mr. Stone. One of the first duties of his position was to read Field's copy very closely, to guard against the publication of such bitter innuendoes and scandalous personalities as had kept the Denver Tribune in constant hot water between warlike descents upon the editor and costly appeals to the courts. Mr. Stone wanted all the racy wit that had distinguished Field's contributions to the Tribune without the attendant crop of libel suits, and he relied on Ballantyne's Scotch caution to put a query mark against every paragraph that squinted at a breach of propriety or a breach of the peace, or that invited a libel suit. There was no power of final rejection in Ballantyne's blue pencil. That was left for Mr. Stone's own decision. It was well that it was so, for Mr. Ballantyne's appreciation of humor was so rigid that, had it been the arbiter as to which of Field's paragraphs should be printed, I greatly fear me there would often have been a dearth of gayety in the "Sharps and Flats." The relations in which Ballantyne and I found ourselves to Field can best be told in the language of Mr. Cowen, whose own intimate relations with Field antedated ours and continued to the end:

"Coming immediately under the influence of John Ballantyne and Slason Thompson, respectively managing editor and chief editorial writer of the News—the one possessed of Scotch gravity and the other of fine literary taste and discrimination—the character of Field's work quickly modified, and his free and easy, irregular habits succumbed to studious application and methodical labors. Ballantyne used the blue pencil tenderly, first attacking Field's trick fabrications and suppressing the levity which found vent in preceding years in such pictures of domestic felicity as:

_Baby and I the weary night Are taking a walk for his delight, I drowsily stumble o'er stool and chair And clasp the babe with grim despair, For he's got the colic And paregoric Don't seem to ease my squalling heir.

Baby and I in the morning gray Are griping and squalling and walking away— The fire's gone out and I nearly freeze— There's a smell of peppermint on the breeze. Then Mamma wakes And the baby takes And says, "Now cook the breakfast please."_

"The every-day practical joker and entertaining mimic of Denver recoiled in Chicago from the reputation of a Merry Andrew, the prospect of gaining which he disrelished and feared. He preferred to invent paragraphic pleasantries for the world at large and indulge his personal humor in the office, at home, or with personal friends. Gayety was his element. He lived, loved, inspired, and translated it, in the doing which latter he wrote, without strain or embarrassment, reams of prose satire, contes risques, and Hudibrastic verse."

It is a singular illustration of the irony and mutations of life that one of the early paragraphs Field wrote for the "Sharps and Flats" column was inspired by what was supposed to be a fatal assault on his friend by a notorious political ruffian in Leadville. The paragraph, which appeared on September 12th, 1883, is interesting as a specimen of Field's style at that period, and as showing in what esteem he held Cowen, with whom he had been associated on the Denver Tribune and whose name recurs in these pages from time to time:

Edward D. Cowen, the city editor of the Leadville Herald, who was murderously assaulted night before last by a desperado named Joy, was one of the brightest newspaper men in the West. He came originally from Massachusetts, and has relatives living in the southern part of Illinois. He was about thirty years of age. He went to Leadville about three months ago to work on ex-Senator Tabor's paper, the Herald, and was doing excellently well. He was a protege, to a certain extent, of Mrs. Tabor No. 2. She admired his brilliancy, and volunteered to help him in any possible way. It was speaking of him that she said: "My life will henceforth be devoted to assisting worthy young men. In life we must prepare for death, and how can we better prepare for death than by helping our fellow-creatures? Alas!" she added with a sad, sad sigh, "alas! death is, after all, what we live for." Young Cowen had all the social graces men and women admire; he was bright in intellect, great in heart, and hearty of manner. The loss of no young man we know of would be more deplored than his demise.

Cowen never wholly recovered from the effects of his encounter with Joy, but he survived to joke with Field over the past tense in which this paragraph is couched, and to afford me valuable assistance in completing this character-study of our friend.

I have already referred to the "box stall" in which Field sawed his daily wood, as he was accustomed to call his work. As the day of thinking that any old pine table, with a candle box for a chair, crowded off in any sort of a dingy garret, was good enough for the writers who contributed "copy" for a newspaper, has been succeeded by an era of quarter-sawed oak desks, swivel chairs, electric light, and soap and water in editorial quarters throughout the country, let me attempt to describe the original editorial rooms of the Daily News less than twenty years ago. The various departments of the paper occupied what had been three four-story, twenty-five-foot buildings. The floors of no two of these buildings above the first story were on the same level. They had evidently been originally built for lodging houses. The presses and storerooms for the rolls of paper filled the cellars. The business office occupied one store, which was flanked on either side by stores that would have been more respectable had they been rented as saloons, which they were not, because of the conscientious scruples of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. Parts of two of the buildings were still rented as lodgings. Up one flight of stairs of the centre building, in the front, Mr. Stone had his office, which was approached through what had been a hall bedroom. His room was furnished with black walnut, and a gloomy and oppressive air of mystery. Mr. Stone had the genius and the appearance of a chief inquisitor. He was as alert, daring, and enterprising an editor as the West has ever produced.

The rear of this twenty-five-foot building was given up to the library and to George E. Plumbe, the editor for many years of the Daily News Almanac and Political Register. The library consisted of files of nearly all the Chicago dailies, of Congressional Records and reports, the leading almanacs, the "Statesman's Year Book," several editions of "Men of the Times," half a dozen encyclopaedias, the Imperial and Webster's dictionaries, a few other text books, and about two inches of genuine Chicago soot which incrusted everything. The theory advanced by Field's friend, William F. Poole, then of the Public Library and later of the Newberry Library, that dust is the best preservative of books, rendered it necessary that the only washstand accessible to the Morning News should be located in the library. None of us ever came out of that library as we went in—the one clean roller a day forbade it. Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our "copy" with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which Field has illustrated, were held.



Before quitting the library, which has since grown, in new quarters, to be one of the most comprehensive newspaper libraries in the country, I cannot forbear printing one of Field's choice bits at the expense of the occupants of this floor of the Daily News office. It has no title, but is supposed to be a soliloquy of Mr. Stone's:

_I wish my men were more like Plumbe And not so much like me— I hate to see the paper hum When it should stupid be. For when a lot of wit and rhyme Appears upon our pages, I know too well my men in time Will ask a raise in wages.

I love to sit around and chin With folk of doubtful fame, But oh, it seems a dreadful sin When others do the same; For others gad to get the news To use in their profession, But anything I get I use For purpose of suppression._

Field's poetical license here does injustice to Mr. Stone, whose inquisitions generally concerned matters of public or political concern and whose practice of the editorial art of suppression was never exercised with any other motive than the public good or the sound discretion of the editor, who knew that the libel suits most to be feared were those where the truth about some scalawag was printed without having the affidavits in the vault and a double hitch on the witnesses.

Up another long, narrow, dark stairway was the office of Mr. Ballantyne, the managing editor. He occupied what had been a rear hall bedroom, 7 x 10 feet. He was six feet two tall, and if he had not been of an orderly nature, there would not have been room in that back closet, with its one window and flat-topped desk, for his feet and the retriever, Snip—the only dog Field ever thoroughly detested. Ballantyne's room was evidently arranged to prevent any private conferences with the managing editor. It boasted a second chair, but when the visitor accepted the rare invitation to be seated, his knees prevented the closing of the door. The remainder of this floor of the centre building and the whole of the same floor of the next building south were taken up by the composing room. A door had been cut in the wall of the building to the north, just by Mr. Ballantyne's room, through which, and down three steps, was the space devoted to the editorial and reportorial staff of the Morning News. The front end of this space was partitioned off into three rooms, 7 x 12 feet each. Field claimed one of these boxes, the dramatic critic and solitary artist of the establishment one, and Morgan Bates, the exchange editor, and I were sandwiched in between them. The rest of the floor was given up to the city staff. The telegraph editor had a space railed off for his accommodation in the composing room. If a fire had broken out in the central building in those days, along about ten P.M., the subsequent proceedings of Eugene Field and of others then employed on the Morning News would probably not have been of further interest, except to the coroner.

Of the three rooms mentioned, Field's was the only one having any pretensions to decoration. Its floor and portions of the wall were stained and grained a rich brown with the juice of the tobacco plant. In one corner Field had a cupboard-shaped pigeon-file, alphabetically arranged, for the clippings he daily made—almost all relating some bit of personal gossip about people in the public eye. Scattered about the floor were dumb-bells, Indian clubs, and other gymnastic apparatus which Field never touched and which the janitor had orders not to disturb in their disorder. Above Field's desk for some time hung a sheet of tin, which he used as a call bell or to drown the noise of the office boy poking the big globe stove which was the primitive, but generally effective, way of heating the whole floor in winter. That it was not always effective, even after steam was introduced, may be inferred from the following importunate note written by Field to Collins Shackelford, the cashier, on one occasion when the former had been frozen almost numb: