Before the newspaper cashier had risen as a life-saving station on the horizon of Eugene Field’s constant impecuniosity, his father’s executor, Mr. Gray, had been the object of his intermittent appeals for funds to meet pressing needs.  The means he invented to wheedle the generous, but methodical, executor out of these appropriations afforded Field more genuine pleasure than the success that attended them.  The coin they yielded passed through his fingers like water through a sieve, but the enjoyment of his happy schemes abided in his memory and also in that of his constant friend always.  One of Field’s most effective methods of securing an advance from Mr. Gray was the threat of going on the stage under the assumed name of Melvin L. Gray.  On one occasion Field approached him for money for living expenses, and being met with what appeared to be an unrelenting negative, coolly said:  “Very well, if you cannot advance it to me out of the estate I shall be compelled to go on the stage.  But as I cannot keep my own name I have decided to assume yours, and shall have lithographs struck off at once.  They will read, ’To-night, M.L.  Gray, Banjo and Specialty Artist.’” It is needless to say that the much-needed funds were found.  But whether they went to the payment of living expenses, to the importunity of some threatening creditor, or were divided between the joys of the bibliomaniac and the bon vivant, Field in his most confiding humor never disclosed to me.

But this I know, that one of these always respectful, if apparently threatening, appeals to Mr. Gray, was the basis for one of the few newspaper attacks on Eugene Field that he resented deeply.  Some time after he had left St. Louis and was engaged on the Denver Tribune, the Spectator, a weekly paper of the former city, contained the following gossip regarding him which was written in a thoughtless rather than an intentionally inimical spirit: 

One of the cleverest young journalists of this city, a few years ago, was Mr. Eugene Field, whose charming short poems and witty paragraphs still occasionally find their way into our paper from Denver, where he is now located.  Mr. Field was the happy possessor of one of those sunny dispositions which is thoroughly antagonistic to trouble of every description; he absolutely refused to entertain the black demon under any pretext whatever, and after spending a small fortune with the easy grace of a prince, he settled down to doing without one with equal grace and nonchalance, in a manner more creditable to himself than satisfying to his creditors.  Did his hatter or tailor present an untimely bill, the gay debonnaire Eugene would scribble on the back thereof an impromptu rhyme expressive of his deep regret at not being able to offer the cash instead, and return the same with an airy grace that the renowned orator, J. Wilkins Micawber, himself might have envied.