It was the hope of their father that one, if not both, of his sons would adopt the profession of the law, in which he and his brother Charles and their father before them had attained both distinction and something more than a competence.  But neither Eugene nor his brother Roswell had the slightest predilection for the law.  By nature and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms of justice.

The stage, on the other hand, possessed a fascination for Eugene.  He was a mimic by inheritance, a comedian by instinct and unrestrained habit.  Everything appealed to his sense of the queer, the fanciful, and the utterly ridiculous.  He was a student of the whimsicalities of character and nature, and delighted in their portrayal by voice or pen.  Strange to relate, however, his first thought of adopting the histrionic profession contemplated tragedy as his forte.  He had inherited a wondrous voice, deep, sweet, and resonant, from his father, and had a face so plastic that it could be moulded at will to all the expressions of terror, malignity, and devotion, or anon into the most grotesque and mirth-provoking lines of comedy.  His early love for reciting passages from “Spartacus,” referred to by the Rev. Mr. Tufts, showed the bent of his mind, and when he became master of his own affairs he sought out Edwin Forrest and confided to him his ambition to go on the boards.  Would that I could reproduce Field’s version of that interview!  He approached the great tragedian with a sinking heart, for Forrest had a reputation for brusque roughness never exceeded on or off the stage.  But Eugene managed to prefer his request for advice and an opening in Forrest’s company.  The dark-browed Othello looked his visitor over from head to foot, and, in a voice that rolled through the flies of the stage where this little scene was enacted, exclaimed: 

“Boy, return to your friends and bid them apprentice you to a wood-sawyer, rather than waste your life on a precarious profession whose successes are few and whose rewards are bankruptcy and ingratitude.  Go! study and learn of Coriolanus.”

This I repeat from memory, preserving the sense and the three words “boy,” “wood-sawyer,” and “Coriolanus,” which always recurred in Field’s various versions of “Why I did not go on the stage.”  Eugene returned to St. Louis and quietly disposed of the costumes he had prepared for such characters as Hamlet, Lear, and Spartacus.

[Illustration:  MELVIN L. GRAY.]

Francis Wilson, in his “The Eugene Field I Knew,” preserves the following story of Eugene’s further venture in search of a profession: