not to study art but to
have a pleasant time in Paris--while she (no doubt) regarded me as a
rude, forth-putting anarch--which I was. At this point our acquaintance
and our controversy rested.

As the months and years passed I heard of her only through some
incidental remark of her brother. Having no slightest premonition of the
part she was to play in my after life, I made no inquiries concerning
her. She, however, followed me--as I afterward learned, by means of my
essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite uninterested (so
far as I know) in the personality of their author.

CHAPTER THREE

In the Footsteps of General Grant

Among the new esthetic and literary enterprises which the Exposition had
brought to Chicago was the high-spirited publishing firm of Stone and
Kimball, which started out valiantly in the spring of '94. The head of
the house, a youth just out of Harvard, was Herbert Stone, son of my
friend Melville Stone, manager of the Associated Press. Kimball was
Herbert's classmate.

Almost before he had opened his office, Herbert came to me to get a
manuscript. "Eugene Field has given us one," he urged, "and we want one
from you. We are starting a real publishing house in Chicago and we need
your support."

There was no resisting such an appeal. Having cast in my lot with
Chicago, it was inevitable that I should ally myself with its newest
literary enterprise, a business which expressed something of my faith in
the west. Not only did I turn over to Stone the rights to _Main Traveled
Roads_, together with a volume of verse--I promised him a book of
essays--and a novel.

These aspiring young collegians were joined in '95 by another Harvard
man, a tall, dark, smooth-faced youth named Harrison Rhodes, and when,
of an afternoon these three missionaries of culture each in a long frock
coat, tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves and shining silk hats, paced
side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had the effect of an
esthetic invasion, but their crowning audacity was a printed circular
which announced that tea would be served in their office in the Caxton
Building on Saturday afternoons! Finally as if to convince the city of
their utter madness, this intrepid trio adventured the founding of a
literary magazine to be called _The Chap Book!_ Culture on the Middle
Border had at last begun to hum!

Despite the smiles of elderly scoffers, the larger number of my esthetic
associates felt dee