am deeply distressed lest the article referred to may create a widely different impression.  Of course it makes no difference to you, but as gratitude is about all I have in this world to bestow on those who are good and kind to me, it is not right that I should be advertised—­even in a joking way—­as an ingrate.

  Yours sincerely,

  EUGENE FIELD.

This letter is valuable in more ways than the one which it was so unnecessarily written to serve.  It is a negative admission of the general faithfulness of the impression left by Field upon those familiar with his life in St. Louis, and the reference to gratitude as all he had to bestow upon his true friends will be recognized as genuine by all who ever came near enough to his inner life to appreciate its sweetness as well as its lightness.  As for his airy method of disposing of insistent creditors I have no doubt that the rhymes on the backs of their bills more often than not were more to them than the dollars and cents on their faces.

During the second period of his life in St. Louis two sons were born to Field and his wife, Melvin G., named after the “Dear Mr. Gray,” of the foregoing letter, and Eugene, Jr., who, being born when the Pinafore craze was at its height, received the nickname of “Pinny,” which has adhered to him to the present time.  The fact that Melvin of all the children of Eugene Field was never called by any other name by a father prone to giving pet names, more or less fanciful, to every person and thing with which he came in contact, is, I take it, an even more sincere tribute to the high respect and love, if not reverence, in which he held Melvin’s godfather.

The third son and last child born to Field during the time of which I am now writing appeared upon the scene, with his two eyes of wondrous blue, very like his father’s, at Kansas City, whither the family had moved in the year 1880.  Although he was duly christened Frederick, this newcomer was promptly nicknamed “Daisy,” because, forsooth, Field one day happened to fancy that his two eyes looked like daisies peeping up at him from the grass.  The similitude was far fetched, but the name stuck.

In Kansas City, where Field went from St. Louis to assume at thirty years of age the managing editorship of the Times of that town, the family lived in a rented house which was made the rendezvous for all the light-hearted members of the newspaper and theatrical professions.  Perhaps I cannot give a more faithful picture of Field’s life through all this period than is contained in the following unpublished lines, to the original manuscript of which I supplied the title, “The Good Knight and His Lady.”  Perhaps I should explain that it was written at a time when Field was infatuated with the stories and style of the early English narratives of knights and ladies: 

  THE GOOD KNIGHT AND HIS LADY

  Soothly there was no lady faire
  In all the province could compare
        With Lady Julia Field,
  The noble knight’s most beauteous wife
  For whom at any time his life
        He would righte gladly yield.