Whilst I was drawing this chef d’oeuvre (and, by the way, it
  took an hour to do it) Ballantyne came in.  “That’s mighty good,”
  said he; “are you making it for the paper?”

  I understand that Stone has sailed out of town again, this time to
  Kansas City.  Poor man! his slavish devotion to the details of his
  newspaper is simply grinding the life out of him.

  Mrs. Billings [Field’s sister-in-law] has arrived from Washington
  and she will go down to St. Louis with Julia and Mrs. Ballantyne
  next Monday morning.  Later in the fall she will make us a visit.

Cowen pawned his watch to-day for $40 and bet $30 to $21 on the Chicagos.  This is the result by innings:  [Here followed another drawing as shown in the accompanying fac-simile.] The watch retained its normal size for two innings, but in the third it shrank so sadly as to become hardly visible to the mind’s eye.  In the fourth inning, however, it began to pick up, and in the seventh it had resumed its normal shape, and in the ninth it was as big as a dinner-plate and we could hear it tick, although hung in Moses Levy’s secluded retreat on Dearborn Street, two and one-half miles distant.  As we were riding over to the base-ball grounds Cowen’s eyes rested on a vision of female loveliness—­a girl he knew—­standing on the corner of Madison and Aberdeen Streets.  It was all Hawkins and I could do to hold him in the car.  But I am determined to save this young and interesting soul if I can.  Peattie and his wife start for Colorado next Monday.  ’Tis now 11 o’clock.  Where are you that you are not here to walk with me?  Tossing in the “upper ten” [another drawing] and struggling for fresh air!  Well, good-by and bless you, old boy.

  Affectionately yours,

  EUGENE FIELD.

[Illustration:  A LETTER FROM EUGENE FIELD CONTAINING THREE DRAWINGS.]

If the reader is at all curious in such matters, a cursory inspection of the illustrations of this letter will assure him that its composition and embellishment must have cost its fanciful writer at least three hours’ work.  But this was the kind of work that lightened the toil of Field’s daily grind.

  II

  (Written in gamboge ink) CHICAGO, Sunday night, September the 12th,
  1886.

Dear Nomp:—­You have been gone but forty-eight hours—­it seems an age.  I have been thinking the matter over and I have come to the appalling conclusion that I shall starve before you get back, unless, perchance, in the meantime, Marie Matilda or some fair unknown sends me truage that can be realized upon.

Dock has returned with an air of rusticity that makes me shiver when I think of all he has got to go through with before you come to the rescue.