permitting this that Mr. Hayes earned the scorn of Field.  When President Hayes retired from the White House to Fremont, instead of becoming another Cincinnatus at the plough he was overshadowed by the stories of Mrs. Hayes’s devotion to her chicken-farm, and the incongruity of the occupation appealed so strongly to Field’s sense of the ridiculous that he prevailed on Mr. Stone to let him go down to Fremont to take in its full absurdity with his own eyes.

Before going to Omaha, Field had taken the precaution to write enough “Sharps and Flats” to fill his column until he returned—­a precaution he omitted when he started for Fremont, on the understanding that his associates on the editorial page would do his work for him.  This was our opportunity, and gladly we availed ourselves of it.  The habit had grown on Field of introducing his paragraphic skits with such “country journalisms” as: 

“We opine,”

“Anent the story,”

“We are free to admit,”

“We violate no confidence,”

“It is stated, though not authoritatively,”

“Our versatile friend,”

“We learn from a responsible source,” and

“Our distinguished fellow-townsman.”

This he accompanied with a lavish bestowal of titles that would have done credit to the most courtly days of southern chivalry.

So when Field was safely off for Fremont we started to produce a column that would be a travesty on his favorite expressions at the expense of his titled friends.  We opined and violated all the confidences of which we were possessed in regard to Colonel Phocion Howard, of the Batavia frog-farm, Major Moses P. Handy, the flaming sword of the Philadelphia Press, Senator G. Frisbie Hoar, Major Charles Hasbrook, Colonel William E. Curtis, Colonel John A. Joyce, Colonel Fred W. Nye, Major E. Clarence Stedman, and Colonels Dana, Watterson, and Halstead, and we exhausted the flowers of Field’s vocabulary in daring encomiums on Madame Modjeska, Lotta, Minnie Maddern, and Marie Jansen.  If any of Field’s particular friends were omitted from “favorable mention” in that column, it was because we forgot or Mr. Stone’s blue pencil came to the rescue of his absent friend.  Ballantyne was party to the conspiracy, because he had often remonstrated against the rut of expression into which Field was in danger of falling.

When Field returned that one column had driven all thoughts of Mrs. Hayes’s hens from his thoughts.  There was a cold glitter in his pale blue eyes and a hollow mock in the forced “ha, ha” with which he greeted some of our “alleged efforts at wit.”  He said little, but a few days later relieved his pent-up feelings by printing the following: 

  MAY THE 26th, 1885