nd I leave the matter in your hands."

Field closed his letter with a request that an invitation should be
extended to me, which I duly received. This accounts for the reference
to an approaching visit to Indianapolis in his letter of September 22d.

By the way, Field got more pleasure out of the various pronunciations
of Goethe's name than instruction from the perusal of his poems. He was
always starting or fostering discussions over it, as in the following
paragraph:

The valued New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe"
with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has
rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently
before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet
occurred:

_"Until at last John Wolfgang Goethe
Was gathered home, upward of eighty."_

To resume the Fredericton series of letters:

XI

CHICAGO, Sunday the 26th, 1886.

Dear Boy:--Such a close, muggy night this is that I feel little like
writing to you or to anybody else. Yet I am not one to neglect or
shirk a duty. I have been with Kate Field all the evening, and we
have discussed everything from literature down to Sir Charles Dilke
and back again. A mighty smart woman is Kate! My wife returned from
St. Louis last Thursday, bringing about fifty of my books with her.
They were mostly of the Bohn's Library series, but among them was a
set of Boswell's Johnson, Routledge edition of 1859. I want you to
have an edition of this kind, and I have sent to New York to see if
it can be had (cheap). I am reading like a race-horse. The famous
history of Dr. Faustus has done me a power of good, and I have been
highly amused with a volume of Bohn which contains the old Ray
proverbs.

Isn't it about time for you to be getting back home? You have been
gone about sixteen days now, and we are growing more and more
lonesome. Peattie is looked for next Tuesday. Mr. Stone goes out of
town to-morrow--to Dakota, I believe--and is to be absent for a week
also. Shackelford will be back at work to-morrow. You alone are
delinquent. Not only am I lonesome--egad, I am starving! So if you
don't come _in propria persona_, at least _send_ something. The old
Dock has been as grumpy as a bear to-day and I have had a hard time
bearing with him. He announced to me to-day that he thought that I
was fickle--I tell you this so that you may repeat i