of those tests which sooner or later he applied to all—­the test of linking their names with something utterly ludicrous and impossible, but published with all the solemn earmarks of verity.  It was on the occasion of Mr. Stedman’s visit to Chicago on its invitation to lecture before the Twentieth Century Club.  This gave Field the cue to announce the coming event in a way to fill the visitor with consternation.  About two weeks before the poet-critic was expected, Field’s column contained the following innocent paragraph: 

Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, and the foremost of American critics, is about to visit Chicago.  He comes as the guest of the Twentieth Century Club, and on the evening of Tuesday, the 28th inst., he will deliver before that discriminating body an address upon the subject of “Poetry,” this address being one of the notable series which Mr. Stedman prepared for and read before the undergraduates of Johns Hopkins University last winter.  These discourses are, as we judge from epitomes published in the New York Tribune, marvels of scholarship and of criticism.

Twenty years have elapsed, as we understand, since Mr. Stedman last visited Chicago.  He will find amazing changes, all in the nature of improvements.  He will be delighted with the beauty of our city and with the appreciation, the intelligence, and the culture of our society.  But what should and will please him most will be the cordiality of that reception which Chicago will give him, and the enthusiasm with which she will entertain this charming prince of American letters, this eminent poet, this mighty good fellow!

I doubt if Mr. Stedman ever saw this item, which Field merely inserted, as was his wont, as a prelude to the whimsical announcement which followed in two days, and which was eagerly copied in the New York papers in time to make Mr. Stedman cast about for some excuse for being somewhere else than in Chicago on the 29th of April, 1891.  This second notice is too good an instance of the liberty Field took with the name of a friend in his delectable vocation of laying “the knotted lash of sarcasm” about the shoulders of wealth and fashion of Chicago, not to be quoted in full.  It was given with all the precision of typographical arrangement that is considered proper in printing a veritable programme of some public procession, in the following terms: 

Chicago literary circles are all agog over the prospective visit of Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, the eminent poet-critic.  At the regular monthly conclave of the Robert Browning Benevolent and Patriotical Association of Cook County, night before last, it was resolved to invite Mr. Stedman to a grand complimentary banquet at the Kinsley’s on Wednesday evening, the 29th.  Prof.  William Morton Payne, grand marshal of the parade which is to conduct the famous guest from the railway station the morning he arrives, tells us that the procession will be in this order: 

  Twenty police officers afoot.