would have said that their arrangement was crude and ineffective; but from the collector’s point of view the arrangement could scarcely have been bettered.  Everything seemed to have settled in its appropriate niche, according to its value in the collector’s eye, irrespective of its value in the dealer’s catalogue.  Of his collection before it was moved from the house on Evanston Avenue, adjoining the Waller lot, his friend Julian Ralph wrote: 

“He had cabinets and closets filled with the wreckage of England, New England, Holland, and Louisiana; walls littered with mugs, and prints, and pictures, plates, and warming-pans; shelves crowded with such things, and mantel-pieces likewise loaded, through two stories of his house.  All were curios of value, or else beauty, for he was no ignoramus in his madness.  His den above stairs, where he sat surrounded by a great and valuable collection of first editions and other prized books, was part of the museum.  There hung the axe Mr. Gladstone gave him at Hawarden, and the shears that Charles A. Dana used during a quarter of a century.  These two prizes he cherished most.  He had been to Mr. Dana and begged the shears, receiving the promise that he should have them left to him in Mr. Dana’s will.  He waited five years, grew impatient, past endurance, and then came on to New York and got the shears from Paul Dana.”

To his new home, which he christened “The Sabine Farm,” were moved all the accumulated treasures of his mania for curiosities and antiques.  “I do not think he thought much of art,” wrote Edward Everett Hale in his introduction to “A Little Book of Profitable Tales”; and the motley, albeit fascinating, aggregation of rare and outlandish chattels in Eugene Field’s house justified that conclusion.  Of what the world calls art, whether the creation of the brush, the chisel, the loom, or the potter’s oven, he had the most rudimentary conception.  His eye was ever alert for things queer, rare, and “out of print.”  Of these he was a connoisseur beyond compare, a collector without a peer.  He valued prints, not for their beauty or the art of the engraver, but for some peculiarity in the plate, or because of the difficulties overcome in their “comprehension.”  He knew all that was to be known of the delightful art of the binder, but his most cherished specimen would always be one where a master had made some slip in tooling.  For oddities and rarities in all the range of the collector’s fever, from books and prints to pewter mugs and rag dolls, his mania was omnivorous and catholic.  And strange as it may seem, with his mania was mingled a shrewd appreciation of the commercial side of it all.  This is what Mr. Ralph means when he says Field was no ignoramus in his madness.