In his “Auto-Analysis,” Field says:  “In 1872 I visited Europe, spending six months and my patrimony in France, Italy, Ireland, and England.”  This is as near the sober truth as anything Field ever wrote about himself.  The youthful spendthrift and his companion landed in Ireland, and by slow, but extravagant, stages reached Italy, taking the principal cities and sights of England and France en route.  About the only letters that reached America from Field during this European trip (always excepting those that went by every mail-steamer to a young lady in St. Jo) were those addressed with business-like brevity to Mr. Gray, calling for more and still more funds to carry the travellers onward.  Before they had reached Italy the mails were too slow to convey Field’s importunity, and he had recourse to the cable to impress Mr. Gray with the dire immediateness of his impecuniosity.  In order to relieve this Mr. Gray was forced to discount the notes for the deferred payments on the sale of the Field land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice “No funds available.”  Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited.  By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets and an inexhaustible fund of mirthful stories and invaluable experience.

On arriving in New York, Field had to seek the Western Union Telegraph office to secure funds for the necessary transportation to St. Louis.  These Mr. Gray furnished so liberally that Eugene promptly invested the surplus in a French poodle, which he carried in triumph back to Missouri as a memento of his sojourn in Paris.  This costly pet, the sole exhibit of his foreign travel, he named McSweeny, in memory, I suppose, of the pleasant days he had spent in Ireland.

[Illustration:  MRS. MELVIN L. GRAY.]

Years afterward I remember to have been with Field when he opened a package containing a watch, which for more than a decade had been an unredeemed witness to his triumphant entry into and impecunious exit from Naples or Florence—­I forget which.

Mrs. Below, Field’s sister-in-law, in her little brochure, “Eugene Field in His Home,” preserves a letter written by him from Rome to a friend in Ireland, in which may be traced the bent of his mind to take a whimsical view of all things coming within the range of his observation.  In this he bids farewell to political discussion: 

For since the collapse of the Greeley and Brown movement I have given over all hope of rescuing my torn and bleeding country from Grant and his minions, and have resolved to have nothing more to do with politics.  Methinks, my country will groan to hear this declaration!

And there is the following description of how he was enjoying himself in Italy, with the last remittances of his patrimony growing fewer and painfully less: