early hour, or to places of amusement, from which they went so straight home after the performances that there was not a single fashionable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties after the play.  Whether this condition, making theatre-going less expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees of merit.  The losses which the best artists and plays almost invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped in Chicago.

Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same reason that it patronized the drama.  It sought entertainment and amusement, and grand opera is a serious business.  As Field said of himself, Chicago liked music “limited”; and its liking was generally limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible exception of Boston.

I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in 1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most congenial atmosphere and associations when he came hither that year.  These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation to the end.

Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now.  It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance.  Its tallest skyscraper stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival.  The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring without starting on a run to avoid being bridged.  The cable-car was an experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he did horses or horse-cars.  In many ways Chicago reminded Field of Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its assumed airs of importance, and its township politics.  Despite its forty odd years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as such.