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 other errand, however pressing, to do Field’s antic bidding.  These notes were generally flung into the waste-paper basket, much to my present regret, for of themselves they would have made a most remarkable exhibit.  Sometimes the summons would be in the form of a bar of music like this which I preserved: 

[Illustration:  A BAR OF MUSIC. Written by Eugene Field.]

But more often it was a note in the old English manner, which for years was affected between us, like this one: 

PUISSANT AND TRIUMPHANT LORD: