spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He scattered his patrimony gaily and then when the last inherited cent was gone, turned with, equal gayety to earning, not only enough to support himself, but the wife and family that, with the royal and reckless prodigality of genius, he provided himself with at the very outset of his career.

If he set "no store by genius," he at least had that faith in his own ability which "compels the elements and wrings a human music from the indifferent air." From the time he applied himself to the ill-requited work of journalism he never wavered or turned aside in his purpose to make it the ladder to literary recognition. He was over thirty before he realized that in three universities he had slighted the opportunity to acquire a thorough equipment for literary work. But he was undismayed, for did he not read in his beloved "Reliques of Father Prout" how "Loyola, the founder of the most learned and by far the most distinguished literary corporation that ever arose in the world, was an old soldier who took up his 'Latin Grammar' when past the age of thirty"?

It is the contrast and apparent contradiction between the individual and the author that makes the character of Eugene Field interesting to the student. If the man were simply any prosaic person possessed of the gift of telling tales, writing stories, and singing lullabies, this study of his life would have been left unwritten. Many authors have I known who put all there was of them into their work, who were personally a disappointment to the intellect and a trial to the flesh. With Eugene Field the man was always a bundle of delightful surprises, an ever unconventional personality of which only the merest suggestion is given in his works.

In the study I have made of the life of Eugene Field in the following pages I have received assistance from many sources, but none has been of so great value as that from his father's friend, Melvin L. Gray, in whose home Field found the counsel of a father and the loving sympathy of a mother. The letters Mr. Gray placed at my disposal, whether quoted herein or not, have been invaluable in filling in the portrait of his beloved ward.

To Edward D. Cowen, whose intimate friendship with Field covered a period of nearly fifteen years in three cities and under varying circumstances, these pages owe very much. From his brother, Roswell Field, I have had the best sort of sympathetic aid and counsel in filling out biographical detail without in any way committing himself to the views or statements of this study.

Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field not only owed his vitalized familiarity with Horace, "Prout," and "Kit North," but that superficial knowledge of medical terms of which he made such constant and effective use throughout his writings, has also placed me under many obligations for data and advice.

To these and the others whose names are freely sprinkled through this study I wish to make fitting acknowledgment of my many obligations, and I trust the reader will share my grateful sentiments wherever the faithful quotation marks remind him that such is their due.

SLASON THOMPSON.

CHICAGO, September 30th, 1901.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

DRAWINGS AND FAC-SIMILES
Facing Page