did not love all children,
he truly loved very few children. His own children were very dear to
him, both those that came in his early wedded life and the two who were
born to him after his return from Europe. They were a never-failing
source of interest and enjoyment to him. They were the human documents
he loved best to study. They wore no masks to conceal their emotions,
and he hated masks--on others. But above all, they were bone of his
bone and flesh of his love, the pledges and hostages he had given to
fortune, and they were the children of her to whom he had vowed eternal
faith "when their two lives were young." But Field's fondness for other
people's children was like that of an entomologist for bugs--for
purposes of study, dissection, and classification. He delighted to see
the varying shades of emotion chase each other across their little
tell-tale faces. This man, who could not have set his foot on a worm,
who shrank from the sight of pain inflicted on any dumb animal, took
almost as much delight in making a child cry, that he might study its
little face in dismay or fright, as in making it laugh, that he might
observe its method of manifesting pleasure. He read the construction of
child-nature in the unreserved expressions of childish emotions as he
provoked or evoked them. Thus he grew to know children as few have
known them, and his exceptional gift of writing for and about them was
the result of deliberate study rather than of personal sympathy. That
his own children were sometimes a trial to their "devoted mother" and
"fond father," as he described their parents, may be inferred from the
facts which were the basis of such bits of confidence between Field and
the readers of his "Sharps and Flats" as this:

An honest old gentleman living on the North Side has two young sons,
who, like too many sons of honest gentlemen, are given much to
boyish worldliness, such as playing "hookey" and manufacturing yarns
to keep themselves from under the maternal slipper. The other day
the two boys started out, ostensibly for school, but as they did not
come home to dinner and were not seen by their little sister about
the school-grounds, the awful suspicion entered the good mother's
mind that they had again been truant. Along about dark one of them,
the younger, came in blue with cold.

"Why, Pinny," said the mother, "where have you been?"

"Oh, down by the lake, getting warm," said the youngster.