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 Hawkins, a special writer on the News, Morgan Bates, Paul Hull, a sketch writer who fancied he looked like Lincoln and told stories that would have made Lincoln blush to own a faint resemblance, and Cowen when in town, to say nothing of “visiting statesmen” and play-actors as occasional visitors and contributors to the score.  Some insight into the characters of the four regulars may be gained from the statement that Field invariably ordered coffee and apple pie, Ballantyne tea and toast with oysters, Dr. Reilly oysters and claret, and I steak and Bass’s ale.