before him, he was truly a paragon.

Substitute a physician for the priest; change the scene from the
neighborhood of the Blarney stone to a basement chop and oyster house
in Chicago; instead of a continental education give him an American
experience as a surgeon in the Civil War, in the hospitals of
Cincinnati, and on the yellow fever commission that visited Memphis in
1867, and you have the Dr. Frank W. Reilly, to whom Field owed more
than to all the schools, colleges, and educational agencies through
which he had flitted from his youth up. When I first knew Dr. Reilly
he was Secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, located at
Springfield, and an occasional correspondent of the Chicago Herald.
The State of Illinois owes to him its gradual rescue from a dangerous
laxity in the matter of granting medical licenses, until to-day the
requirements necessary to practise his profession in this state
compare favorably with those of any other state of the Union. Shortly
after I went from the Herald to the News, as related in a previous
chapter, Dr. Reilly changed his correspondence to the latter paper. In
1885 he resigned his position on the State Board of Health, and,
coming to Chicago, formed an editorial connection with the News that
continued until he was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Health for
Chicago. In this last position, which he occupies to-day, I do not
hesitate to say that he has done more to promote its health,
cleanliness, and consequent happiness, than any other single citizen
of Chicago. If the sanitary canal was not his child, it was pushed to
completion through the fostering hand of his adoption. The Lincoln
Park Sanitarium for poor children, and other similar agencies
exploited by the Daily News, were born of his suggestions and were
nurtured by his personal supervision. It is impossible, and would be
out of place here, to specify what Dr. Reilly has done for the
sanitation of Chicago as Chief Deputy in the Health Office.
Administrations may come and go. Would that he could sip the elixir of
life, that he might go on forever!

[Illustration: DR. FRANK W. REILLY.]

On his occasional visits to Chicago, before he came up here for good,
Dr. Reilly had become a welcome guest and sometimes host in our
midnight round-ups at the Boston Oyster House, and when he made his
home here he was taken into regular fellowship. The regulars then were
Field, Ballantyne, Reilly, and I--with Mr. Stone, Willis Hawkin