In wrath I smite my quivering lyre,
  Come once again, fair Muse, inspire
  My song to more heroic acts
  Than these poor simple, truthful facts. 
  Cursed be the man who hatched the plot! 
  Let dire misfortune be his lot! 
  Palsied the hand that struck the blow! 
  Blind be the eyes that saw the show! 
  Hated the wretch who ruthless bled
  This innocent old quadruped.

  Subpreps, a word of caution, please;
  Better prepare your A, B, C’s
  Than prowl around at dead of night. 
  Don’t rouse the beast in Daniel’s breast;
  Perhaps you’ll come out second best.

  Dear, gentle reader, pardon, pray,
  I’m thinking now I hear you say,
  “Oh, nonsense! what a foolish fuss
  About a horse, Bucephalus."_

This is no better verse, and possibly no worse, than much of the adolescent doggerel that is so often preserved by fond parents to prove that their child early gave signs of poetic and literary genius.

[Illustration:  STATE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS AT COLUMBIA, MO.]

CHAPTER VI

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

Eugene Field was in his twenty-first year when he turned his back upon the colleges and faced life.  Roswell M. Field, Sr., had been dead two years, and the moderate fortune which he had left, consisting mostly of realty valued at about $60,000, had not yet been distributed among the legatees, Eugene and Roswell M. Field and Mary French Field.  To the last named one-fifth had been willed in recognition of the loving care she had bestowed upon the testator’s two motherless sons, each of whom was to receive two-fifths of the father’s estate.  Eugene therefore looked forward to the possession of property worth something like $25,000.  In St. Louis, in 1871, this was regarded as quite a large fortune.  It would have been ample to start any young man, with prudence, regular habits, and a small modicum of business sense, well along in any profession or occupation he might adopt.  But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature.

On first going to St. Louis to live, Eugene Field was peculiarly fortunate in being taken into the home and enduring friendship of Melvin L. Gray, the executor of his father’s estate, and of Mrs. Gray.  To the memory of the latter, on her death several years since, Eugene contributed a memorial from which I have already quoted and which in some respects is the most sincerely beautiful piece of prose he ever wrote.  In that he refers to his first coming to St. Louis in the following terms: