My acquaintance with Mrs. Gray began in 1871.  I was at that time just coming of age, and there were many reasons why I was attracted to the home over which this admirable lady presided.  In the first-place Mrs. Gray’s household was a counterpart of the households to which my boyhood life in New England had attracted me.  Again both Mr. and Mrs. Gray were old friends of my parents; and upon Mr. Gray’s accepting the executorship of my father’s estate, Mrs. Gray felt, I am pleased to believe, somewhat more than a friendly interest in the two boys, who, coming from rural New England life into the great, strange, fascinating city, stood in need of disinterested friendship and prudent counsel.  I speak for my brother and myself when I say that for the period of twenty years we found in Mrs. Gray a friend as indulgent, as forbearing, as sympathetic, as kindly suggestive and as disinterested as a mother, and in her home a refuge from temptation, care and vexation.

[Illustration:  EARLY PORTRAITS OF EUGENE FIELD.]

In the subscription edition of “A Little Book of Western Verse,” of which I had all the labor and none of the fleeting fame of publisher, Field dedicated his paraphrase of the Twenty-third Psalm to Mr. Gray, and it was to this constant friend of his youth and manhood, who still survives (1901), that Field indited the beautiful dedication of “The Sabine Farm”: 

  Come dear old friend! and with us twain
    To calm Digentian groves repair;
  The turtle coos his sweet refrain
    And posies are a-blooming there,
  And there the romping Sabine girls
  With myrtle braid their lustrous curls.

I have followed the original copy Field sent to Mr. Gray, which has several variations in punctuation from the version as printed in “The Sabine Farm,” where the eighth line reads: 

  Bind myrtle in their lustrous curls,

which the reader can compare with the original as printed above.  In that same dedication Field referred to Mr. Gray as one

  Who lov’st us for our father’s sake.

In announcing to Mr. Gray by letter, June 28th, 1891, his intention to make this dedication, Field wrote: 

It will interest, and we [Roswell was a joint contributor to “The Sabine Farm”] are hoping that it will please you to know that we shall dedicate this volume to you, as a slight, though none the less sincere, token of our regard and affection to you, as the friend of our father and as the friend to us.  Were our father living, it would please him, we think, to see his sons collaborating as versifiers of the pagan lyrist whose songs he admired; it would please him, too, we are equally certain, to see us dedicating a result of our enthusiastic toil to so good a man and to so good a friend as you.

These quotations are interesting as indicating the character of the surroundings of Eugene Field’s early life in St. Louis.