that would enslave me--
Without this friend?

Nay, fate forfend such wild disaster!
May I play Pollux to his Castor
Thro' years that bind our hearts the faster
With golden tether;
And every morbid fear releasing,
May our affection bide unceasing--
every salary raise increasing--
Then die together!_

Finally, Dr. Reilly is the Dr. O'Rell of "The Love Affairs of a
Bibliomaniac," whom Field playfully credits with prescribing one or the
other--the Noctes or the Reliques--to his patients, no matter what
disease they might be afflicted with. He prescribed them to both of us,
and Field took to his bed with the Reliques and did not get up until he
had "comprehended" the greater part of its five hundred and odd pages
of perennial literary stimulant.

CHAPTER XV

METHOD OF WORK

Although Eugene Field was the most unconventional of writers, there
was a method in all his ways that made play of much of his work. No
greater mistake was ever made than in attributing his physical
break-down to exhaustion from his daily grind in a newspaper office.
No man ever made less of a grind than he in preparing copy for the
printer. He seldom arrived at the office before eleven o'clock and
never settled down to work before three o'clock. The interim was spent
in puttering over the exchanges, gossiping with visitors, of whom he
had a constant stream, quizzing every other member of the staff,
meddling here, chaffing there, and playing hob generally with the
orderly routine of affairs. He was a persistent, insistent,
irrepressible disturber of everything but the good-fellowship of the
office, to which he was the chief contributor. No interruption from
Field ever came or was taken amiss. From the hour he ambled
laboriously up the steep and narrow stairs, anathematizing them at
every step, in every tone of mockery and indignation, to the moment he
sat down to his daily column of "leaded agate, first line brevier," no
man among us knew what piece of fooling he would be up to next.

Something was wrong, Field was out of town, or some old crony from
Kansas City, St. Louis, or Denver was in Chicago, if about one o'clock
I was not interrupted by a summons from him that the hour for luncheon
had arrived. Although I was at work within sound of his voice, these
came nearly always in the form of a note, delivered with an unvarying
grin by the office-boy, who would drop any oth