Yours as ever,

  FIELD.

  Detroit, 0; St. Louis, 0; game called at end of fifth inning. 
  Chicago walloped Kansas City.

  VI

  CHICAGO, Saturday, September the 18th, 1886.

This, sweet lad, is the dullest Saturday that has befallen me in many a year.  John and his bride are over at Hooley’s Theatre watching that lachrymose melodrama, “Alone in London.”  There is nothing worth seeing at any other house.  There is nobody for me to visit with, so here I sit in this box trying to kill the time.  I see very little of Cowen.  A disreputable looking friend of his from the West is here dead-broke and hunting work; Cowen is feeding and sleeping him ad interim, and I think the fellow has an evil influence over our friend....

  I am, as ever, your friend,

  FIELD.

  VII

  CHICAGO, Sunday, September 19th, 1886.

My dear Old Boy:—­This man Reilly whom you have put upon me has just played upon me the most shamefulest trick I ever heard tell of.  He invited me out to supper and told me he had only eighty cents.  He ordered twenty cents worth and made me scrimp along on sixty cents.  When he came to pay the check he produced a five-dollar bill!  I never felt so humiliated in all my life.  I pine for the return of the sweet friend who seeks not by guile to set limit to my appetite.

My children insisted upon going to bed last night with pieces of Gussie’s wedding cake under their pillows.  Dady had the presence of mind to wake up in the night and eat his piece.  He told me this morning that he dreamed that he was married to Mr. Cowen.  Last evening I wandered down town in a furious rainstorm and tried to find somebody I knew.  Failing in this, I meandered home and went to bed without saying my prayers, conscious of having spent an ill day.

At the theatre this week:  Columbia, “Pepita”; McVicker’s, Lotta; Grand, Kate Castleton; Hooley’s, “Private Secretary.”  Dock is trying to get me to go to the Columbia to-night, but your pale face looms up in my mind’s eye and warns me not to go, or, at least, not to sit in a box if I do go.

  The conclusion of this letter has been sacrificed to the importunity
  of some autograph fiend from whose tribe I have had the greatest
  difficulty in preserving its fellows.

  VIII

  CHICAGO, Monday, September the 20th, 1886.

The envious old Dock, who has never had an emotion, an ambition or a hope beyond a quart bottle of Ike Cook’s Imperial, said to me but just now:  “Why do you waste your time writing to that man Thompson?  He will never thank you for it; he will put up none the more liberally when he returns.”  Then he added, with a bitter look:  “You never wrote to me while I was at Springfield!” Ah, how little he knows of you, this peevish old glutton who cares for naught