pounds, and
have shocking taste in dress.

But I like to have well-dressed people about me.

My eyes are blue, my complexion pale, my face is shaven, and I
incline to baldness.

It is only when I look and see how young, and fair, and sweet my
wife is that I have a good opinion of myself.

I am fond of companionship of women, and I have no unconquerable
prejudice against feminine beauty. I recall with pride that in
twenty-two years of active journalism I have always written in
reverential praise of womankind.

I favor early marriage.

I do not love all children.

I have tried to analyze my feelings toward children, and I think I
discover that I love them, in so far as I can make pets of them.

I believe that, if I live, I shall do my best literary work when I
am a grandfather.

So cleverly are truth and fiction dove-tailed together in this
"Auto-Analysis" that it would puzzle a jury of his intimate friends to
say where Field was attempting to state facts and where he was laughing
in his sleeve. Even the enumeration of his publications is amazingly
inaccurate for a bibliomaniac's reply to the inquiries of his own
guild. Francis Wilson's sumptuous edition of "Echoes from the Sabine
Farm" preceded that of McClurg, Chicago, 1893, by more than two years,
and a limited edition of the "Second Book of Verse" was published
privately by Melville E. Stone, Chicago, 1892, more than a year before
it was published by the Scribners, as stated in Field's chronological
order.

Under ordinary circumstances such lapses in a list of a writer's
published works would be a venial fault, and not worth mentioning; but
in the case of one who set such store on "special large paper limited
editions," they would be inexplicable--if that writer had not been
Eugene Field. With him they were simply a notification to his intimates
that the whole thing was not to be taken as a serious bibliology of his
works or index of his character.

So far as the cyclopedic narrative of his life is concerned, it is
intended to be fairly accurate; but Field's notion that he suddenly
began to write verse very frequently in 1889 runs contrary to the
record in Denver and Chicago from 1881 to 1888, inclusive. The
intentional waggery of misinformation masquerading as truth begins
where Field leaves the recital of his life to give what purports to be
an analysis of his character and sentiments. Here he lets his "winged
fancy lo