ribune_. Over his desk
hung,--"This is my busy day," and on the wall,--"God bless our
proofreader, He can't call for him too soon." In his office he kept an
old bottomless black-walnut chair. Across its yawning chasm he would
carelessly thrown old newspapers. As it was the only unoccupied chair
in the room, the casual visitor would drop unsuspectingly into the
trap. The angry subscriber who had come to wreak vengeance upon the
writer of irritating personalities could not withstand the apparently
sincere apologies which Field lavished upon his victim. It was so
humiliating to a man of Field's sensibilities to be obliged to receive
such important visitors in an office whose very furniture indicated
the poverty of the newspaper.

In 1883 Field moved to Chicago, where the rest of his life was
passed. Mr. Stone, one of the proprietors of _The News_, had gone to
Denver to have a personal interview with Field, whose work had
attracted attention in the newspaper world. Field stipulated that he
was to have a column a day for his own use. The Chicago public soon
was attracted by the brilliant versatility of the writer of "Sharps
and Flats," the title of the column written by Field.

Some months after Field had moved to Chicago he concluded that the
general public ought to know that he had arrived. It was a cold
morning in December. "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 perplexed 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."

Field had execrable taste in dress and he knew it. Consequently he
enjoyed presenting neckties to his friends. His biographer, Slason
Thompson, who worked in the same newspaper office, separated only by a
low thi