His body in the fatal cannon then they force Shouting erstwhile in accents madly hoarse, “Death to all Rats”—­the fatal match is struck, The cannon pointed upwards—­then kerchuck!  Fiz!  Snap!  Ker—­boom!  Slug 14’s grotesque form Sails out to ride a race upon the storm, Up through the roof, and up into the sky—­ As if he sought for “cases” up on high, Till like a rocket, or like one who’s trusted, He fell again to earth—­completely busted.

There is not much suggestion, or even promise, in this doggerel, of the Eugene Field whose verses of occasion were destined within a dozen years to be sought for in every newspaper office in America.

Long before Field learned the value of his time and writing, he began to appreciate the value of printer’s ink and showed much shrewdness in courting its favor.  He did not wait for chance to bring his wares into notice, but early joined the circle of busy paragraphers who formed a wider, if less distinguished, mutual admiration society than that free-masonry of authorship which at one time almost limited literary fame in the United States to Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.  Robert J. Burdette is about the only survivor of the coterie of paragraphers, who, a quarter of a century ago, made such papers as the Burlington Hawkeye, the Detroit Free Press, the Oil City Derrick, the Danbury News, and the Cincinnati Saturday Night, widely quoted throughout the Union for their clever squibs and lively sallies.  Field put himself in the way of the reciprocating round of mutual quotation and spicy comment, and before he left St. Louis his “Funny Fancies” in the Times-Journal had the approval of his fellow-jesters if they could not save that paper from its approaching doom.

Before leaving St. Louis, however, Eugene Field was to strike one of the notes that was to vibrate so sweetly and surely to his touch unto the end.  He had lost one baby son in St. Jo, and Melvin was a mere large-eyed infant when his father was moved at Christmas-time, 1878, to write his “Christmas Treasures,” which he frequently, though incorrectly, declared to be “the first verse I ever wrote.”  He probably meant by this that it was the first verse he ever wrote “that he cared to preserve,” those specimens I have introduced being only given as marking the steps crude and faltering by which he attained a facility and technique in the art of versification seldom surpassed.

In Mr. Field’s “Auto-Analysis” will be found the following reference to this early specimen of his verse: 

  I wrote and published my first bit of verse in 1879:  It was entitled
  “Christmas Treasures” [see “Little Book of Western Verse"].  Just ten
  years later I began suddenly to write verse very frequently.

Which merely indicates what little track Field kept of how, when, or where he wrote the verse that attracted popular attention and by which he is best remembered.  I need hardly say that with a few noteworthy exceptions his most highly-prized poems were written before 1888, as a reference to the “Little Book of Western Verse,” above cited, and which was published in 1889, will clearly show.