cClure's Magazine, entitled, "A Dialogue Between Eugene Field and
Hamlin Garland." It purported to be an interview which the latter had
with the former in his "attic study" in Chicago. Field was represented
surrounded by "a museum of old books, rare books, Indian relics,
dramatic souvenirs, and bric-a-brac indescribable." The result is a
most remarkable jumble of misinformation and fiction, with which Field
plied Garland to the top of his bent. What Garland thought were bottom
facts were really sky-scraping fiction. As if this were not enough,
Garland made Field talk in an approach to an illiterate dialect, such
as he never employed and cordially detested. Garland represented Field
as discussing social and economic problems--why not the "musical
glasses," deponent saith not. The really great and characteristic point
in the dialogue was where something Field said caused "Garland to lay
down his pad and lift his big fist in the air like a maul. His
enthusiasm rose like a flood." The whole interview was a serious piece
of business to the serious-minded realist. To Field, at the time, and
for months after, it was a huge and memorable joke.

But there are thousands who accept the Eugene Field of the
"Auto-Analysis" and of the Garland dialogue as the true presentment of
the man, when the real man is only laughing in his sleeve at the reader
and the interviewer in both of them.

CHAPTER X

LAST YEARS

If this were a record of a life, and not a study of character, with the
side-lights bearing upon its development and idiosyncrasies, there
would remain much to write of Eugene Field after his return from
abroad. Much came to him in fame, in fortune, in his friendships, and
in his home. Two more children were born to brighten his hearthstone
and refresh his memories of childhood and the enchanting ways of
children. The elder of these two, a son, was named Roswell Francis, a
combination of the names of Field's father and mother, with the change
of a vowel to suit his sex; the younger, his second daughter, was
christened Ruth, after Mrs. Gray, in whose home Field had found, more
than a score of years before, the disinterested affection of a mother,
"a refuge from temptation, care, and vexation."

Although immediately upon getting back Field resumed his daily grind of
"Sharps and Flats" for the Chicago Record, his paragraphs showed more
and more the effects of his reading and his withdrawal from the
activities and assoc