ife?"

There never was any doubt of Field's "shocking taste in dress," and he
never sought to cultivate or reform it. But what will those who knew
him say of the statement, "I am a poor diner, and I drink no wine or
spirits of any kind; I do not smoke tobacco." Field was, by the common
verdict of those who had the pleasure of meeting him at any dinner
company, the best diner-out they ever knew. He had a keen enjoyment of
the pleasures of the table, and but for that wretched stomach would
have been as much of an authority on eating as he came to be on
collecting. He loved to discuss the art of dining, although he was
forbidden to practise it heartily.

His favorite gift-books "appertained" to the art of cooking, in one of
which (Hazlitt's "Old Cooking Books") I find inscribed to Mrs.
Thompson:

_Big bokes with nony love I send
To those by whom I set no store--
But see, I give to you, sweete friend,
A lyttel boke and love gallore!

E.F._

Field gave up drinking wine and all kinds of alcoholic liquors, as has
been related, before coming to Chicago. And yet I have seen him sniff
the bouquet of some rare wine or liquor with the quivering nostril of a
connoisseur, but--and this was the marvel to his associates--without
"the ruby," as Dick Swiveller termed it, being the least temptation to
his lips.

Eugene Field "not smoke tobacco"! He was one of the most inveterate
smokers in America. If he had been given his choice between giving up
pie or tobacco, I verily believe he would have thrown away the pie and
stuck to the soothing weed out of which he sucked daily and hourly
comfort. He had acquired the Yankee habit of ruminating with a small
quid of tobacco in his cheek when a good cigar was not between his
teeth. He consumed not only all the cigars that fell to his share in a
profession where cigars are the invariable concomitants of every chance
meeting, every social gathering, and every public function, but also
those that in the usual round of our life fell to me. And I was not his
only abetter in despoiling the Egyptians who thought to work the
freedom of the press with a few passes of the narcotic weed. It is a
curious fact that Field's pretended aversion to tobacco persists
through all his writings, from the Denver Primer sketches down. In
those we find him attributing the authorship of this warning to
children to S.J. Tilden:

_Oh, children, you Must never chew
Tobacco--it is Awful!
The