been here a
month before his muse began to wield the "knotted lash of sarcasm"
above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fashion:

_Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo
A beauteous Detroit belle,
And for a month--or, maybe, two--
He wooed the lovely lady well.

But, oh! one day--one fatal day--
As mused the belle with naught to do,
A local paper came her way
And, drat the luck! she read it through.

She read of alleys black with mire--
A river with a putrid breath--
Streets reeking with malarial ire--
Inviting foul disease and death.

Then, with a livid snort she called
Her trembling lover to her side--
"How dare you, wretched youth," she bawled,
"Ask me to be your blushing bride?

Go back unto your filthy town,
And never by my side be seen,
Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown,
Until you've got your city clean!"_

Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning
News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of
paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed
"Current Gossip" instead of "Odds and Ends." The heading was only a
makeshift until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead.
On August 31st, 1883, the title "Sharps and Flats" was hoisted to the
top of Field's column, and there it remained over everything he wrote
for more than a dozen years.

There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this
title, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of
these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in "An Appreciation" of
Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In
what, on the whole, is probably the best analysis of Field's genius
and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:

"What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at
least of the Venusian's character. He could say of his affection for
the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of
the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has
been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early
eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram
and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the
versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer
to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr.
Phillips Francis's translation of