cal comments on Literary Life, a weekly that sought to
make capital by engaging President Cleveland's sister, Miss Rose
Cleveland, as its editor, not only led to her early retirement from an
impossible position, but to the early collapse of the publication
itself. When Miss Cleveland first came to Chicago to assume the duties
of editorship Field welcomed her in verse:

_THE ROSE

Since the days of old Adam the welkin has rung
With the praises of sweet-scented posies,
And poets in rapturous phrases have sung
The paramount beauty of roses.

Wheresoever she 'bides, whether resting in lanes
Or gracing the proud urban bowers,
The red, royal rose her distinction maintains
As the one regnant queen among flowers.

How joyous are we of the West when we find
That Fate, with her gifts ever chary,
Has decreed that the rose who is queen of her kind
Shall bloom on our wild Western prairie.

Let us laugh at the East as an impotent thing
With envy and jealousy crazy,
While grateful Chicago is happy to sing
In praise of the rose, she's a daisy._

CHAPTER V

PUBLICATION OF HIS FIRST BOOKS

Although the bibliomaniac and collector will claim that "The Tribune
Primer," printed in Denver in 1882, was Eugene Field's first book, and
cite the fact that a copy of this rare pamphlet recently sold for $125
as proof that it is still his most valuable contribution to literature,
his first genuine entrance into the world of letters between covers
came with the publication of "Culture's Garland," by Ticknor & Company,
of Boston, in August, 1887. Whatever may be the truth as to the size of
the first edition of the "Primer," so few copies were printed and its
distribution was so limited that it scarcely amounted to a bona-fide
publication. Neither did the form of the "Primer," a little 18mo
pamphlet of forty-eight pages, bound in pink paper covers, nor its
ephemeral newspaper persiflage, rise to the dignity of a book.

"Culture's Garland," on the contrary, marks the first real essay of
Field as a maker of books. Field himself is the authority for the
statement that "Tom" Ticknor edited the book. "I simply sent on a lot
of stuff," wrote he, "and the folks at the other end picked out what
they wanted and ran it as they pleased." This is scarcely just to Mr.
Ticknor. Field himself, to my knowledge, selected the matter for
"Culture's Garland," and arranged it in the general form in whi