and recklessness."

This letter was written on Washington's birthday, 1873, and in later
years the omission of any reference to the anniversary would have
thrown suspicion on its genuineness; but Field had not yet begun to
reckon life by anniversaries. Neither is there in it a shadow of the
impending crisis in his finances nor a suggestion of another reason
that robbed his return voyage of all distressing thoughts of retreat.

CHAPTER VII

MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE

And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has
naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted
in his written tributes to womankind and mother love. In his memorial
to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for
the love between parent and child. "For my dear mother," he wrote,
"went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the
blessedness of a mother's love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is
all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a
thing." This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is
not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have
come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for
something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those
upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims.

Through his boyhood and school days, Field's affection for the
petticoated sex had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease
all the daughters of Eve. It is doubtful if his affections were ever
more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of
Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of
school or college. He came to both in his own way and time; with the
difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden's
hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from
the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of
scholarship and letters.

It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field
made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European
trip and experiences. Now Edgar's parents lived at St. Joseph, and
with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia
Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was
Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still
in short dresses. What more natural than that Edgar's e