I am a poor diner, and I drink no wine or spirits of any kind; I do
  not smoke tobacco.

  I dislike crowds, and I abominate functions.

  I am six feet in height, am of spare build, weigh 160 pounds, and
  have shocking taste in dress.

  But I like to have well-dressed people about me.

  My eyes are blue, my complexion pale, my face is shaven, and I
  incline to baldness.

  It is only when I look and see how young, and fair, and sweet my
  wife is that I have a good opinion of myself.

I am fond of companionship of women, and I have no unconquerable prejudice against feminine beauty.  I recall with pride that in twenty-two years of active journalism I have always written in reverential praise of womankind.

  I favor early marriage.

  I do not love all children.

  I have tried to analyze my feelings toward children, and I think I
  discover that I love them, in so far as I can make pets of them.

  I believe that, if I live, I shall do my best literary work when I
  am a grandfather.

So cleverly are truth and fiction dove-tailed together in this “Auto-Analysis” that it would puzzle a jury of his intimate friends to say where Field was attempting to state facts and where he was laughing in his sleeve.  Even the enumeration of his publications is amazingly inaccurate for a bibliomaniac’s reply to the inquiries of his own guild.  Francis Wilson’s sumptuous edition of “Echoes from the Sabine Farm” preceded that of McClurg, Chicago, 1893, by more than two years, and a limited edition of the “Second Book of Verse” was published privately by Melville E. Stone, Chicago, 1892, more than a year before it was published by the Scribners, as stated in Field’s chronological order.

Under ordinary circumstances such lapses in a list of a writer’s published works would be a venial fault, and not worth mentioning; but in the case of one who set such store on “special large paper limited editions,” they would be inexplicable—­if that writer had not been Eugene Field.  With him they were simply a notification to his intimates that the whole thing was not to be taken as a serious bibliology of his works or index of his character.

So far as the cyclopedic narrative of his life is concerned, it is intended to be fairly accurate; but Field’s notion that he suddenly began to write verse very frequently in 1889 runs contrary to the record in Denver and Chicago from 1881 to 1888, inclusive.  The intentional waggery of misinformation masquerading as truth begins where Field leaves the recital of his life to give what purports to be an analysis of his character and sentiments.  Here he lets his “winged fancy loose.”  He mingles fact with his fiction even as

  The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
  Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
  In deepest consequence.