home affairs and especially about
Mrs. Bacon--my grudge against her _in re_ mince pie has expired
under the statute of limitations. God bless you, dear friend--you
and yours,

Affectionately,

EUGENE FIELD.

Although Field's body was rusticating on farm fare in Wisconsin, his
pen was furnishing its two thousand three hundred words a day to the
Daily News, as the "Sharps and Flats" column through the summer of
1889 shows. In a letter written from the Benedict Farm during the
Golden Week to Cowen, who was at this time in London working on the
English edition of the New York Herald, Field unfolds some of his
doings and plans:

The copies of the London Herald came to hand to-day; I am sure I am
very much indebted to you for the boom you are giving me; it is of
distinct value to me, and I appreciate it. I send you herewith a
number of my verses that have appeared this week in my column.
Having done my work ahead I am rusticating in great shape and have
become a veritable terror to the small fry in which the lakes of
this delectable locality abound. My books will be issued about the
first of August; they will be very pretty pieces of work; I shall
send you a set at once. My western verse seems to be catching on; I
notice that a good many others of the boys are striking out in the
same vein. Young McCarthy has made a translation from the Persian,
and I have half a notion to paraphrase parts of it. I want to dip
around in all sorts of versification, simply to show people that
determination and perseverance can accomplish much in this
direction. You know that I do not set much store by "genius."

The books to which Field refers as likely to be issued about the first
of August were his two "Little Books" of verse and tales, the copy for
which had not, when he wrote the foregoing, all gone to the printer.
His idea then was that a book could be got out with something like the
same lightning dispatch as a daily newspaper.

To tell the story of the publication of Field's two "Little Books,"
unique as it was in the making of books, requires that I say a few
words of the change that had come over our personal relations, though
not in our friendship. Two causes operated to make this change--my
marriage in the spring of 1887, which drew from Field "Ye Piteous
Appeal of a Forsooken Habbit" and the manuscript volumes of the best
of his verse prior to that event, and my retirement from the st