brown hair and beard cut rather close. He listened, mainly, going off into gusts of laughter occasionally as the other man gave a quaint turn to some very frank phrase. The tall host was Eugene Field, the interviewer a Western writer by the name of Garland.

“Well now, brother Field,” said Garland, interrupting his host as he was about to open another case of rare books. “You remember I’m to interview you to-day.”

Field scowled savagely.

“O say, Garland, can’t we put that thing off?”

“No. Must be did,” replied his friend decisively. “Now there are two ways to do this thing. We can be as literary and as deliciously select in our dialogue as Mr. Howells and Professor Boyesen were, or we can be wild and woolly. How would it do to be as wild and woolly as those Eastern fellers expect us to be?”

“All right,” said Field, taking his seat well upon the small of his back. “What does it all mean anyway? What you goin’ to do?”

“I’m goin’ to take notes while we talk, and I’m goin’ to put this thing down pretty close to the fact, now, you 196 bet,” said Garland, sharpening a pencil.

“Where you wan’to begin?”

“Oh, we’ll have to begin with your ancestry, though it’s a good deal like the introductory chapter to the old-fashioned novels. We’ll start early, with your birth for instance.”

“Well, I was born in St. Louis.”

“Is that so?” the interviewer showed an unprofessional surprise. “Why, I thought you were born in Massachusetts?”

“No,” said Field, reflectively. “No, I’m sorry of course, but I was born in St. Louis; but my parents were Vermont people.” He mentioned this as an extenuating circumstance, evidently. “My father was a lawyer. He was a precocious boy,—graduated from Middlebury College when he was fifteen, and when he was nineteen was made States-Attorney by special act of the legislature; without that he would have had to wait till he was twenty-one. He married and came West, and I was born in 1850.”

“So you’re forty-three? Where does the New England life come in?”

“When I was seven years old my mother died, and father packed us boys right off to Massachusetts and put us under the care of a maiden cousin, a Miss French,—she was a fine woman too.”

Garland looked up from his scratchpad to ask, “This was at Amherst?”

“Yes. I stayed there until I was nineteen, and they were the sweetest and finest days of my life. I like old Amherst.” He paused a moment, and his long face slowly lightened up. “By the way, here’s something you’ll like. When I was nine years old father sent us up to Fayetteville, Vermont, to the old homestead where my grandmother lived. We stayed there seven months,” he said with a grim curl of his lips, “and the old lady got all the grandson she wanted. She didn’t want the visit repeated.”

He sat a moment in silence, and his face softened and his eyes grew tender. “I tell you, Garland, a man’s got to have a layer of country experience somewhere in him. My love for nature dates from that visit, because I had never lived in the country before. Sooner or later a man rots if he lives too far away from the grass and the trees.”

“You’re right there, Field, only I didn’t know you felt it so deeply. I supposed you hated farm life.”

“I do, but farm life is not nature. I’d like to live in the country without the effects of work and dirt and flies.”

The word “flies” started him off on a side-track. “Say! You should see my boys. I go up to a farm near Fox Lake and stay a week every year, suffering all sorts of tortures, in order to give my boys a chance to see farm life. I sit there nights trying to read by a vile-smelling old kerosene lamp, the flies trooping in so that you can’t keep the window down, you know, and those boys lying there all the time on a hot husk bed, faces spattered with mosquito bites and sweating like pigs—and happy as angels. The roar of the flies and mosquitoes is sweetest lullaby to a tired boy.”

“Well, now, going back to that visit,” said the interviewer with persistency to his plan.

“Oh, yes. Well, my grandmother was a regular old New England Congregationalist. Say, I’ve got a sermon I wrote when I was nine. The old lady used to give me ten cents for every sermon I’d write. Like to see it?”

“Well, I should say. A sermon at nine years! Field, you started in well.”

“Didn’t I?” he replied, while getting the book. “And you bet it’s a corker.” He produced the volume, which was a small bundle of note-paper bound beautifully. It was written in a boy’s formal hand. He sat down to read it:

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

He stopped occasionally to look at Garland gravely, as he read some particularly comical phrase: “‘I secondly remark’—ain’t that great?—‘that the wise man remembers even how near he is to the portals of death.’ ‘Portals of death’ is good. ‘One should strive to walk the narrow way and not the one which leads to perdition.’ I was heavy on quotations, you notice.”

“Is this the first and last of your sermons?” queried Garland, with an amused smile.

“The first and last. Grandmother soon gave me up as bad material for a preacher. She paid me five dollars for learning the Ten Commandments. I used to be very slow at ‘committing to memory.’ I recall that while I was thus committing the book of Acts, my brother committed that book and the Gospel of Matthew, part of John, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians and the Westminster Catechism. I would not now exchange for any amount of money the acquaintance with the Bible that was drummed into me when I was a boy. At learning ‘pieces to speak’ I was, however, unusually quick, and my favorites were: ‘Marco Bozzaris,’ ‘Psalm of Life,’ Drake’s ‘American Flag,’ Longfellow’s ‘Launching of the Ship,’ Webster’s ‘Action,’ Shakspeare’s ‘Clarence’s Dream’ (Richard III.), and ‘Wolsey to Cromwell,’ ‘Death of Virginia,’ ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ ‘Hymn of the Moravian Nuns,’ ‘Absalom,’ ‘Lochiel’s Warning,’ ‘Maclean’s Revenge,’ Bulwer’s translation of Schiller’s ‘The Diver,’ ‘Landing of the Pilgrims,’ Bryant’s ‘Melancholy Days,’ ‘Burial of Sir John Moore,’ and ‘Hohenlinden.’”

“I remember when I was thirteen, our cousin said she’d give us a Christmas tree. So we went down into Patrick’s swamp—I suppose the names