hen I say that
for the period of twenty years we found in Mrs. Gray a friend as
indulgent, as forbearing, as sympathetic, as kindly suggestive and as
disinterested as a mother, and in her home a refuge from temptation,
care and vexation.

[Illustration: EARLY PORTRAITS OF EUGENE FIELD.]

In the subscription edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse," of
which I had all the labor and none of the fleeting fame of publisher,
Field dedicated his paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm to Mr. Gray,
and it was to this constant friend of his youth and manhood, who still
survives (1901), that Field indited the beautiful dedication of "The
Sabine Farm":

_Come dear old friend! and with us twain
To calm Digentian groves repair;
The turtle coos his sweet refrain
And posies are a-blooming there,
And there the romping Sabine girls
With myrtle braid their lustrous curls._

I have followed the original copy Field sent to Mr. Gray, which has
several variations in punctuation from the version as printed in "The
Sabine Farm," where the eighth line reads:

_Bind myrtle in their lustrous curls,_

which the reader can compare with the original as printed above. In
that same dedication Field referred to Mr. Gray as one

_Who lov'st us for our father's sake._

In announcing to Mr. Gray by letter, June 28th, 1891, his intention to
make this dedication, Field wrote:

It will interest, and we [Roswell was a joint contributor to "The
Sabine Farm"] are hoping that it will please you to know that we
shall dedicate this volume to you, as a slight, though none the less
sincere, token of our regard and affection to you, as the friend of
our father and as the friend to us. Were our father living, it would
please him, we think, to see his sons collaborating as versifiers of
the pagan lyrist whose songs he admired; it would please him, too,
we are equally certain, to see us dedicating a result of our
enthusiastic toil to so good a man and to so good a friend as you.

These quotations are interesting as indicating the character of the
surroundings of Eugene Field's early life in St. Louis.

It was the hope of their father that one, if not both, of his sons
would adopt the profession of the law, in which he and his brother
Charles and their father before them had attained both distinction and
something more than a competence. But neither Eugene nor his brother
Roswell had the slightest predilectio