We had spent Christmas Eve, 1884, together, and, as usual, had expended our last dime in providing small tokens of remembrance for everyone within the circle of our immediate friends. I parted from him at the midnight car, which he took for the North Side. Going to the Sherman House, I caught the last elevator for my room on the top floor, and it was not long ere I was oblivious to all sublunary things.

Before it was fairly light the next morning I was disturbed and finally awakened by the sound of voices and subdued tittering in the corridor outside my door. Then there came a knock, and I was told that there was a message for me. Opening the door, my eyes were greeted with a huge home-knit stocking tacked to it with a two-pronged fork and filled with a collection of conventional presents for a boy—a fair idea of which the reader can glean from the following lines in Field's handwriting dangling from the toe:

If I have succeeded in conveying any true impression of Eugene Field's nature, the reader can imagine the pleasure he derived from this game, in planning it, in providing the old-fashioned sock, toys, and eatables, and in toiling up six flights of stairs after he knew I was asleep, to see that everything was arranged so as to attract the attention of the passing traveller. The success of his game was fully reported to him by his friend, the night clerk—now one of the best known hotel managers in Chicago—and mightily he enjoyed the report that I had been routed out by the early wayfarer before the light of Christmas broke upon the slumbering city.

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCTION TO COLORED INKS

My room in the Sherman House, then, as now, one of the most conveniently located hotels in the business district of Chicago, was the scene of Eugene Field's first introduction to the use of colored inks. His exquisitely neat, small, and beautifully legible handwriting has always been the subject of wondering comment and admiration. He adopted and perfected that style of chirography deliberately to reduce the labor of writing to a minimum. And he succeeded, for few pen-men could exceed him in the rapidity with which he produced "copy" for the printer and none excelled him in sending that copy to the compositor in a form so free from error as to leave no question where blame for typographical blunders lay. In over twenty years' experience in handling copy I have only known one regular writer for the press who wrote as many words to a sheet as Field. That was David H. Mason, the tariff expert, whose handwriting was habitually so infinitesimal that he put more than a column of brevier type matter on a single page, note-paper size.

Strange to say, the compositors did not complain of this eye-straining copy, which attracted them by its compactness and stretched out to nearly half a column in the "strings" by which their pay was measured. From this it may be inferred that there was never any complaint of Field's manuscript from the most exacting and captious of all newspaper departments—the composing room.

However, I set out to relate the genesis of Field's use of the colored inks, with which he not only embellished his correspondence and presentation copies of his verse, but with which he was wont to illuminate his copy for the printer. It came about in this way:

In the winter of 1885 Walter Cranston Larned, author of the "Churches and Castles of Mediæval France," then the art critic for the News, contributed to it a series of papers on the Walters gallery in Baltimore. These attracted no small attention at the time, and were the subject of animated discussion in art circles in Chicago. They were twelve in number, and ran along on the editorial page of the News from February 23d till March 10th. At first we of the editorial staff took only a passing interest in Mr. Larned's contributions. But one day Field, Ballantyne, and I, from a discussion of the general value of art criticism in a daily newspaper, were led to question whether it conveyed an intelligible impression of the subject, and more particularly of the paintings commented on, to the ordinary reader. The point was raised as to the practicability of artists themselves reproducing any recognizable approach to the original paintings by following Mr. Larned's verbal descriptions. Thereupon we deliberately set about, in a spirit of frolic to be sure, to attempt what we each and all considered a highly improbable feat.

Armed with the best water colors we could find in Abbott's art store, we converted my bachelor quarters in the Sherman House into an amateur studio, where we daily labored for an hour or so in producing most remarkable counterfeits of the masterpieces in Mr. Walters's gallery as seen through Mr. Larned's text. We were innocent of the first principles of drawing and knew absolutely nothing about the most rudimentary use of water colors. Somehow, Field made a worse botch in mixing and applying the colors than did either Ballantyne or I. They would never produce the effects intended. He made the most whimsical drawings, only to obliterate every semblance to his original conception in the coloring. To prevent his going on a strike, I ransacked Chicago for colored inks to match those required in the pictures that had been assigned to him. This inspired him with renewed enthusiasm, and he devoted himself to the task of realizing Mr. Larned's descriptions in colored inks with the zest that produces the masterpieces over which artists and critics rave.

His first work in this line was a reproduction—or shall I call it a restoration—of Corot's "St. Sebastian." In speaking of this as one of the noteworthy paintings in the Walters gallery, Mr. Larned had said that it was a landscape in which the figures were quite subordinate and seemed merely intended to illustrate the deeper meaning of the painter in his rendition of nature. According to the critic's detailed description, it was a forest scene. "Great trees rise on the right to the top of the canvas. On the left are also some smaller trees, whose upper branches reach across and make, with the trees on the right, a sort of arch through which is seen a wonderful stretch of sky. A rocky path leads away from the foreground beneath the overhanging trees, sloping upward until it reaches the crest of a hill beneath the sky. Just at this point the figures of two retreating horsemen are seen. These are the men who have been trying to kill St. Sebastian, and have left him, as they thought, dead in the depth of the forest. In the immediate foreground lies the figure of the half dead saint, whose wounds are being dressed by two women. Hovering immediately above this group,