onsistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity
by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the
human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little
assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He
was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any
mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers.
Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he
acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead,
with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit.
Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than
at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when
Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the
words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the
literary world and to "win a place of lasting distinction."

When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their
four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far
as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion
the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by
this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny"
(Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his
mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful
summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat
on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than
a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to
exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a
chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him
one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a
stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster,
buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head,
and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his
hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to
the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or
pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of
the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office
he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed
with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn
perple