xed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the
fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished
faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms,
where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things,
the success of his joke.

Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl,
and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father
in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same
large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his
disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had
been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious
miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary
was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not
sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary,
that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles,
proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys
and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was
not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an
appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise
and declaim with great effect:

"The Lord will provide, my father can't!"

The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the
attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I
don't think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came
without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any
embarrassing financial condition.

It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place
of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and
limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He
felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming
within the influence of those social and literary conventions that
have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our
literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York
newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do
not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement,
personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a
salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told
Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the
East. For, as he