We have been two months in Nice and a month or so travelling in Italy.  Two weeks we passed in Naples, and a most delightful place we found it.  Its natural situation is simply charming, though the climate is said to be very unhealthy.  I climbed Vesuvius and peered cautiously into the crater.  It was a glorious sight—­nothing else like it in the world!  Such a glorious smell of brimstone!  Such enlivening whiffs of hot steam and sulphuric fumes!  Then too the grand veil of impenetrable white smoke that hung over the yawning abyss!  No wonder people rave about this crater and no wonder poor Pliny lost his life coming too near the fascinating monster.  The ascent of Vesuvius is no mean undertaking, and I advise all American parents to train their children especially for it by drilling them daily upon their backyard ash-heaps.

His descent of Vesuvius was made “upon a dead run,” and he “astonished the natives by my [his] celerity and recklessness.”

This letter was written on Washington’s birthday, 1873, and in later years the omission of any reference to the anniversary would have thrown suspicion on its genuineness; but Field had not yet begun to reckon life by anniversaries.  Neither is there in it a shadow of the impending crisis in his finances nor a suggestion of another reason that robbed his return voyage of all distressing thoughts of retreat.

CHAPTER VII

MARRIAGE AND EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE

And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted in his written tributes to womankind and mother love.  In his memorial to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for the love between parent and child.  “For my dear mother,” he wrote, “went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the blessedness of a mother’s love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a thing.”  This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims.

Through his boyhood and school days, Field’s affection for the petticoated sex had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease all the daughters of Eve.  It is doubtful if his affections were ever more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of school or college.  He came to both in his own way and time; with the difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden’s hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of scholarship and letters.