It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his personal effects, except his father’s library, moved to Chicago.  That library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations.  So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books.  All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts.  He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind.  He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very little assistance through pouring over the printed observations of others.  He was not a classical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers.  Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead, with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit.  Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia.  But I have no doubt that when Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the literary world and to “win a place of lasting distinction.”

When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion the envy and despair of their father.  “Trotty,” the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, “Pinny” (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and “Daisy” (Fred), his mother’s boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers.  The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile’s walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago.  It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town.  So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office.  Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by.  When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein.  Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke.