organs, and an incapacity, on their part, to discharge the vital functions—­a wearing out of the machine before the end of the term for which its duration was designed.  He was eminently qualified to serve, as well as to adorn, society, and in all likelihood he would have found in a greater variety of occupation some relief from the monotonous strain under which his energies prematurely gave way.

But the conditions that confronted Eugene Field at the age of forty-one were very different from those under which his father succumbed prematurely at sixty-one.  He had made a name and fame for himself, but had not stored any of the harvest his writings were beginning to yield.  He could write, as he did, that he expected to do his best literary work when a grandfather, but he had no belief that he would live to enjoy that happy Indian summer of paternity.  He was tired of being moved from rented flat to rented house with his accumulated belongings, and he yearned with the “sot” New England yearning for a permanent home, a roof-tree that he could call his own, a patch of earth in which he could “slosh around,” with no landlord to importune for grudging repairs.

And so Field’s life during his last years has to be considered as a struggle with physical exhaustion, fighting off the inevitable reckoning until he could provide himself and his family with a home and leave to his dear ones the means of retaining it, with the opportunities of education for the juniors.  And bravely and cheerily he faced the situation.  Neither in his social relations nor in his daily task was there observable any trace of the tax he was putting upon his over-strained energy.  He could not afford to make the study of classics a delightful pastime, as his father did, but he made it contribute a constant and delightful fund of reference and allusion in his column.  His first books were selling steadily, and he worked assiduously to make hay while the sun was still above the horizon.  In quick succession, “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,” “With Trumpet and Drum,” the “Second Book of Verse,” “The Holy Cross and Other Tales,” and “Love Songs of Childhood,” with few exceptions, collected from his daily contributions to the Chicago Record, were issued from the press in both limited and popular editions.

On the top of his regular work, which in collected form began to be productive beyond his fondest expectations, Field allowed himself to be over-persuaded into entering the platform field.  The managers of reading-bureaus had been after him for years; but he had resisted their alluring offers, because he would not make a show of himself, and the exertion fagged him.  But in the later years of his life they came at him again, with the promise of more pay per night than he could get by writing in a week, and he reluctantly made occasional engagements, which were a drain on his vitality as well as an offence to his peculiar notions of personal dignity.  After each of these excursions into the platform field, either in the triple alliance with “Bill” Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, or with George W. Cable, in a most effective combination, Field returned to his home in Chicago richer in pocket and interesting experiences, but distinctly poorer in the vital reserve necessary to prolong the battle with that rebellious stomach.