Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls.  Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes.  But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation.  Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity.  Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field’s bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago.  So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect: 

“The Lord will provide, my father can’t!”

The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent.  I don’t think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any embarrassing financial condition.

It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career.  He felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our literature.  He had received many tempting offers from New York newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement, personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a salary nearly double that he was receiving here.  But, as he told Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the East.  For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary “fellers” out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his merits and “grow up with the country.”

The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active political and commercial life.  It had been rebuilt, physically, after the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy paying interest and principal to have much time to read books, much less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense.  It had already become a great publishing centre, but not of the books that engage the critical intelligence of the public.  The feverish devotion of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at an unseasonably