Field always insisted that Messrs. Smith and DeKoven got the title, if not some of the inspiration, for their opera “The Begum” from the argument of his “Buccaneer,” the scheme of which he showed to Harry B. Smith, then a member of the Morning News staff.  But the reason for his failure to carry out his operatic venture is obvious in the argument itself.  It is intrinsically deficient in the elements of surprise, novel situations, and dramatic action necessary for stage effect.  Field would have made it rich in lyrics, but as has been often proved, lyrics alone cannot make a successful opera.  He quickly appreciated this and abandoned the work with “Oh, What Were Life?”

There never was any doubt of Field’s “shocking taste in dress,” and he never sought to cultivate or reform it.  But what will those who knew him say of the statement, “I am a poor diner, and I drink no wine or spirits of any kind; I do not smoke tobacco.”  Field was, by the common verdict of those who had the pleasure of meeting him at any dinner company, the best diner-out they ever knew.  He had a keen enjoyment of the pleasures of the table, and but for that wretched stomach would have been as much of an authority on eating as he came to be on collecting.  He loved to discuss the art of dining, although he was forbidden to practise it heartily.

His favorite gift-books “appertained” to the art of cooking, in one of which (Hazlitt’s “Old Cooking Books”) I find inscribed to Mrs. Thompson: 

  Big bokes with nony love I send
    To those by whom I set no store—­
  But see, I give to you, sweete friend,
    A lyttel boke and love gallore!

  E.F._

Field gave up drinking wine and all kinds of alcoholic liquors, as has been related, before coming to Chicago.  And yet I have seen him sniff the bouquet of some rare wine or liquor with the quivering nostril of a connoisseur, but—­and this was the marvel to his associates—­without “the ruby,” as Dick Swiveller termed it, being the least temptation to his lips.

Eugene Field “not smoke tobacco”!  He was one of the most inveterate smokers in America.  If he had been given his choice between giving up pie or tobacco, I verily believe he would have thrown away the pie and stuck to the soothing weed out of which he sucked daily and hourly comfort.  He had acquired the Yankee habit of ruminating with a small quid of tobacco in his cheek when a good cigar was not between his teeth.  He consumed not only all the cigars that fell to his share in a profession where cigars are the invariable concomitants of every chance meeting, every social gathering, and every public function, but also those that in the usual round of our life fell to me.  And I was not his only abetter in despoiling the Egyptians who thought to work the freedom of the press with a few passes of the narcotic weed.  It is a curious fact that Field’s pretended aversion to tobacco persists through all his writings, from the Denver Primer sketches down.  In those we find him attributing the authorship of this warning to children to S.J.  Tilden: