What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes
  When we are hired to rail and criticise?

It is a question the reader can decide for himself whether his second thought was an improvement.  His original intention contemplated a longer poem, but after he had written a fourteenth line that read: 

  The radiant Pole star of the mimic stage—­

Field concluded to wind it up with the fourteenth line, as in the finished version.

Upon the back of the original manuscript of these lines to Madame Modjeska I find this Sapphic fragment under the line—­suggestive of its subject, “The Things of Life”: 

A little sour, a little sweet,
Fill out our brief and human hour,
meet

He never filled out the blank or gave a clue as to what further reflections on the springs of life were in his mind.

I never knew Field to be as infatuated with any stage production as with the first performance of the pirated edition of “The Mikado” in Chicago, in the summer of 1885.  The cast was indeed a memorable one, including Roland Reed as Koko, Alice Harrison as Yum-Yum, Belle Archer as Pitti-Sing, Frederick Archer as Pooh-Bah, George Broderick as the Mikado, and Mrs. Broderick as Katisha.  The Brodericks had rich church-choir voices, Belle Archer was a beauty of that fresh, innocent type that did one’s eyes good simply to look upon, and she was just emerging into a career that grew in popularity until her untimely death.  Archer was a stilted English comedian who seemed built to be “insulted” as Pooh-Bah, while Roland Reed and Miss Harrison were two comedians of the first rank.  As a singing soubrette, daring, versatile, and popular, Miss Harrison had no superiors in her day.  The entire company was saturated with the spirit and “go” of Gilbert, and fairly tingled with the joyous music of Sullivan.  The fact that the production was of a pirated version, untrammelled by the oversight of D’Oyley Carte, added zest to the performance and enlisted Field’s partisan sympathy and co-operation from the start.  He enjoyed each night’s performance with all the relish of a boy eating the apples of pleasure from a forbidden orchard.  When the season came to an end, as all good things must, Field, Ballantyne, and I went to Milwaukee to see that our friends had a fair start there.  We got back to Chicago on the early morning milk train, and in “Sharps and Flats” the next day Field recorded the definitive judgment that “Miss Alice Harrison, in her performance of Yum-Yum in Gilbert and Sullivan’s new opera of ’The Mikado,’ has set the standard of that interesting role, and it is a high one.  In fact, we doubt whether it will ever be approached by any other artist on the American stage.”

It never has been approached, nor has the opera, so far as my information goes, ever been given with the same Gilbertian verve and swing.  The subsequent performance of “The Mikado” by the authorized company, seen throughout the United States, seemed by comparison “like water after wine.”