A city is in the distance; the smoke that curls up therefrom makes dim fantastic figures against the beautiful blue of the sky.  There is toil in that place, and the din of busy humanity; but upon this faraway hillside, with the sweetest gifts of Nature about me, I care not for these things.  I am soothed by the melodies of wild birds, and by the music of the gentle winds that come from the great white ocean beyond the valleys and the hills, away off there where the ships go sailing.

Perhaps Ruskin, the great artist-master of word-painting, might have produced as perfect a gem of English description as this.  But who besides of our contemporaries has?  To my mind, it is the proof of the perfection of the technical skill in expression to which Field arrived through arduous years, softened and refined by the emotions of affection and gratitude which swept over him as he thought of her who had been a mother to him.  It has its counterpart in the succeeding description of the Pelham hills, in which “the yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the Connecticut,” which I have already quoted in a previous chapter.

Evidently, too, the glorious climate of California was a blessing which brightened as Field took his flight toward the East.  Early in February he was back in the harness in Chicago, celebrating his return with characteristic gayety in “Lyrics of a Convalescent.”  But his contributions to the paper through the winter and early spring of 1894 were confined to occasional verse.  After a short trip to New Orleans, in April, he resumed active work the first week in May; and for the remainder of the year his column gave daily evidence of his mental activity and cheerfulness.

It was while in New Orleans in the spring of 1894 that the following incident, illustrative of the boyish freaks that still engaged Field’s ingenuity, occurred.  I quote from a letter of one of the participants, Cyrus K. Drew, of Louisville:  “I met Field on one of his pilgrimages for old bottles, pewter ware, and any old thing in the junk line.  Some friends of mine introduced our party to Mr. Field and Wilson Barrett and members of his company then playing an engagement in New Orleans.  Mr. Field’s greatest delight was in teasing Miss Maude Jeffries, a Mississippi girl, then leading lady in Mr. Barrett’s company.  She was very sensitive and modest, and it delighted Field greatly when he could playfully embarrass her.  One day I found him in his room busy on the floor pasting large sheets of brown paper together.  He had written a poem to Miss Jeffries in the centre of a large sheet of this wrapping paper in his characteristic small hand—­indeed, much smaller than usual.  On the edges of this sheet I found him pasting others of equal size, so that the whole when complete made a single sheet about eight feet square.  This he carefully folded up