n for the law. By nature and by a
certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the
practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery
of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the
application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms of justice.

The stage, on the other hand, possessed a fascination for Eugene. He
was a mimic by inheritance, a comedian by instinct and unrestrained
habit. Everything appealed to his sense of the queer, the fanciful,
and the utterly ridiculous. He was a student of the whimsicalities of
character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or
pen. Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the
histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte. He had
inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his
father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to
all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into
the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy. His early love
for reciting passages from "Spartacus," referred to by the Rev. Mr.
Tufts, showed the bent of his mind, and when he became master of his
own affairs he sought out Edwin Forrest and confided to him his
ambition to go on the boards. Would that I could reproduce Field's
version of that interview! He approached the great tragedian with a
sinking heart, for Forrest had a reputation for brusque roughness
never exceeded on or off the stage. But Eugene managed to prefer his
request for advice and an opening in Forrest's company. The
dark-browed Othello looked his visitor over from head to foot, and, in
a voice that rolled through the flies of the stage where this little
scene was enacted, exclaimed:

"Boy, return to your friends and bid them apprentice you to a
wood-sawyer, rather than waste your life on a precarious profession
whose successes are few and whose rewards are bankruptcy and
ingratitude. Go! study and learn of Coriolanus."

This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words
"boy," "wood-sawyer," and "Coriolanus," which always recurred in
Field's various versions of "Why I did not go on the stage." Eugene
returned to St. Louis and quietly disposed of the costumes he had
prepared for such characters as Hamlet, Lear, and Spartacus.

[Illustration: MELVIN L. GRAY.]

Francis Wilson, in his "The Eugene Field I Knew," preserves the
following story of Eugene's further ve