A handsome and lively, though wee body
Is the son of my friend, Mrs. Peabody—­
It affords me great joy
That her son is a boy,
And not an absurd little she-body.

More than thirty years since the late Professor John Fiske, when asked to write out an account of his daily life for publication, did very much the same thing as Field palmed off on his correspondents in his “Auto-Analysis.”  He gave some “sure-enough” facts as to his birth, education, and manner of life, but mixed in with the truth such a medley of grotesque falsehoods about his habits of study, eating, and drinking, that he supposed the whole farrago would be thrown into the waste-paper basket.  For thirty years he lived in the serene belief that such had been its fate.  But one day he was unpleasantly reminded of his mistake.  The old manuscript had been resurrected “from the worm-hole of forgotten years,” and he was published widecast as a glutton, not only of work, but in eating, drinking, and sleeping.  A man who defied all the laws of hygiene, of moderation, and of rest.  And when he died, from heat prostration—­an untimely death, that robbed his country of its greatest student mind, while yet his energies were boundless—­that thoughtless story of thirty years ago was revived, to justify the “I told you sos” of the public press.

His “Auto-Analysis” was not the only hoax of this description in which Eugene Field indulged.  In 1893 Hamlin Garland contributed an article to McClure’s Magazine, entitled, “A Dialogue Between Eugene Field and Hamlin Garland.”  It purported to be an interview which the latter had with the former in his “attic study” in Chicago.  Field was represented surrounded by “a museum of old books, rare books, Indian relics, dramatic souvenirs, and bric-a-brac indescribable.”  The result is a most remarkable jumble of misinformation and fiction, with which Field plied Garland to the top of his bent.  What Garland thought were bottom facts were really sky-scraping fiction.  As if this were not enough, Garland made Field talk in an approach to an illiterate dialect, such as he never employed and cordially detested.  Garland represented Field as discussing social and economic problems—­why not the “musical glasses,” deponent saith not.  The really great and characteristic point in the dialogue was where something Field said caused “Garland to lay down his pad and lift his big fist in the air like a maul.  His enthusiasm rose like a flood.”  The whole interview was a serious piece of business to the serious-minded realist.  To Field, at the time, and for months after, it was a huge and memorable joke.

But there are thousands who accept the Eugene Field of the “Auto-Analysis” and of the Garland dialogue as the true presentment of the man, when the real man is only laughing in his sleeve at the reader and the interviewer in both of them.

CHAPTER X