_"Who spilt my bottle of ink?" said Field,
"Who spilt my bottle of ink?"
And then with a sigh, said Thompson, "'Twas I--
I broke that bottle of ink,
I think,
And wasted the beautiful ink."

"Who'll buy a bottle of ink?" asked Field,
"Who'll buy a bottle of ink?"
With a still deeper sigh his friend replied, "I--
I'll buy a bottle of ink
With chink,
I'll buy a bottle of ink!"

"Oh, isn't this beautiful ink!" cried Field,
"Beautiful bilious ink!"
He shook the hand of his old friend, and
He tipped him a pleasant wink,
And a blink,
As he went to using that ink._

While Field insisted on a variegated assortment of inks he did not
demand a separate pen for each color. In lieu of these he possessed
himself of an old linen office coat, which he donned when it was cool
enough for a coat and used for a pen-wiper. When the temperature
rendered anything beyond shirt-sleeves superfluous, this linen affair
was hung so conveniently that he could still use it for what he
regarded as its primary use. In warm weather I wore a presentably clean
counterpart of Field's Joseph's coat of many colors. As often as
necessary this went to the laundry. One day when it had just returned
from one of these periodical visits, I was startled, but not surprised,
to find that Field had appropriated my spotless linen duster to his own
inky uses and left his own impossible creation hanging on my hook in
its stead. Field's version of what then occurred is beautifully, if not
truthfully, portrayed in the accompanying "Proper Sonet" and life-like
portraits.

If the reader will imagine each mark on the coat, of which "Nompy"
bootlessly complains, done in different colors, he will have some idea
of the infinite pains Field bestowed on the details of his epistolary
pranks.

Out of the remarkable series of postal appeals which Field sent to me
when I was visiting in New Brunswick grew an animated correspondence
between Field and my youngest sister. She bore the good old-fashioned
Christian names of Mary Matilda--a combination that struck a responsive
chord in Field's taste in nomenclature, while his "come at once, we are
starving" aroused her sense of humor to the point of forwarding an
enormous raised biscuit two thousand miles for the relief of two
Chicago sufferers. The result was an exchange of letters, one of which
has a direct bearing on his whimsical adoption of many-co