The third son and last child born to Field during the time of which I am now writing appeared upon the scene, with his two eyes of wondrous blue, very like his father's, at Kansas City, whither the family had moved in the year 1880. Although he was duly christened Frederick, this newcomer was promptly nicknamed "Daisy," because, forsooth, Field one day happened to fancy that his two eyes looked like daisies peeping up at him from the grass. The similitude was far fetched, but the name stuck.
In Kansas City, where Field went from St. Louis to assume at thirty years of age the managing editorship of the Times of that town, the family lived in a rented house which was made the rendezvous for all the light-hearted members of the newspaper and theatrical professions. Perhaps I cannot give a more faithful picture of Field's life through all this period than is contained in the following unpublished lines, to the original manuscript of which I supplied the title, "The Good Knight and His Lady." Perhaps I should explain that it was written at a time when Field was infatuated with the stories and style of the early English narratives of knights and ladies:
THE GOOD KNIGHT AND HIS LADY
Soothly there was no lady faire
In all the province could compare
With Lady Julia Field,
The noble knight's most beauteous wife
For whom at any time his life
He would righte gladly yield.
'Twas at a tourney in St. Joe
The good knight met her first, I trow,
And was enamoured, straight;
And in less time than you could say
A pater noster he did pray
Her to become his mate.
And from the time she won his heart,
She sweetly played her wifely part—
Contented with her lot!
And tho' the little knightly horde
Came faster than they could afford
The good wife grumbled not.
But when arrived a prattling son,
She simply said, "God's will be done—
This babe shall give us joy!"
And when a little girl appeared,
The good wife quoth: "'Tis well—I feared
'Twould be another boy!"
She leased her castle by the year—
Her tables groaned with sumptuous cheer,
As epicures all say;
She paid her bills on Tuesdays, when
On Monday nights that best of men—
Her husband—drew his pay.
And often, when the good knight craved
A dime wherewith he might get shaved,
She doled him out the same;
For these and other generous deeds
The good and honest knight must needs
Have loved the kindly dame.
At all events, he never strayed
From those hymeneal vows he made
When their two loves combined;
A matron more discreet than she
Or husband more devote than he
It would be hard to find.
July 4th, 1885
And so in very sooth it would have been. Under what circumstances and with what purpose Field wrote this I cannot now recall, if I ever knew. Nothing like it exists among my many manuscripts of his. It is written in pencil on what appears to be a sheet from a pad of ledger paper, watermarked "1879," a fact I mention for the benefit of his bibliomaniac admirers. And, what is most peculiar, it is written on both sides of the sheet—something most unusual with Field, except in correspondence—where the economy of the old half ounce three-cent postage and his New England training prevailed over his disposition to be lavish with paper if not with ink. Anyway, Field's "Good Knight and His Lady" gives a clearer insight into his home relations than any other thing that has been preserved respecting them. That it was prepared with care is witnessed by several interlineations in ink, sealed by a blot of his favorite red ink on the corner, which for a wonder does not bear the marks of the deliberate blemishes with which he frequently embellished his neatest manuscripts.
CHAPTER VIII
EARLY EXPERIENCES IN JOURNALISM
Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of a tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams. He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or "copy" of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter's day. What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers. The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived. Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature. I wonder why I wrote "western" when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado? From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls, and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire.
There was little about his work at this time that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher. Looking back it is possible, however, to discover something of the flavor of the inextinguishable drollery that persisted to his last printed work in such verses as these in the St. Louis Journal:
THE NEW BABY
We welcome thee, eventful morn
Since to the poet there is born
A son and heir;
A fuzzy babe of rosy hue,
And staring eyes of misty blue
Sans teeth, sans hair.
Let those who know not wedded joy
Revile this most illustrious boy—
This genial child!
But let the brother poets raise
Their songs