A dessert of sliced bananas and oranges is all the rage in the Park
  this season.  Tapioca pudding is a thing of the past.  How true it is
  that humanity is ever variable and fickle!

But there was very much less of this sort of thing and of the daily badinage of the paragrapher than in the days of Field’s primacy in that line.  He was reserving all that was freshest, and sweetest, and most delicate in his fancy for the “Love Affairs.”

I spent the summer of 1895 in Evanston, and one night in October, just as the family was thinking of retiring, I was called to the telephone by Field, who asked if we had any pie in the house, for he was coming up to get a slice from the pantry of my Vermont mother-in-law.  He was gladly bidden to come along.  In a few minutes in he walked, and was made welcome to whatever the pantry afforded—­whether it was pie, pickles, or plain cheese and crackers, I do not now recall.  It appeared that he had been in Evanston that night, giving a reading for the benefit of a social and literary club such as were always drawing drafts upon his good-nature and powers of entertaining.  I never knew Field in better spirits than he was that night.  He told of several humorous incidents that happened at the reading, and then recited one or two of the things he had read there.  He sat at the piano and crooned songs and caressed the ivory keys as he told stories and we talked of the “Love Affairs” and of his prospects, which were never brighter.  None who were present that memorable night will forget his reading of “The Night Wind.”  We turned the lights down low and listened, while with that wonderful voice he brought “the night that broods outside” into the darkened room, with that weird and ghostly: 

  Yoooooooo! 
  Yoooooooo! 
  Yoooooooo!

Not until there was barely time to catch the last electric-car for Buena Park did Field tear himself away from that appreciative company; and then he insisted that I should go with him to the cars.  And so we “walked and talked,” as of old, until the last south-bound car came.  And as he boarded it, it seemed as if ten years had been wiped off the record, and I should see him at the office next morning.  And that was the last time I ever saw Eugene Field alive.

For a few mornings after that I read his column in the Record.  A few more chapters were added to the “Love Affairs,” and then: 

On Saturday morning, November 2d, Field spoke to the readers of the Record, through his accustomed column and in his accustomed spirit of human sympathy and genial humor.  It led off with the little shot at his native city: 

  No matter what else it did, if the earthquake shock waked up St.
  Louis, there should be no complaint.