1.  Death and the Soldier Prose. 10 minutes. 2.  The Humane Lad (new) Verse. 3 minutes 3.  The Noontide Hymn (new) Verse. 3 minutes 4.  The Merciful Lad (new) Verse. 2 minutes 5.  The Divine Lullaby (new) Verse. 2 minutes.

“The reading of these pieces will require not more than twenty minutes, and I would prefer to give them consecutively.  Numbers 2 and 4 are humorous.  I do not like ‘Death and the Soldier’ as much as ‘The First Christmas Tree,’ the ‘Robin and the Violet,’ or ’The Mountain and the Sea’—­I mean I do not like it so much as a piece of fanciful literary work, but it may be more catchy.  You know what your audience will like, and I leave the matter in your hands.”

Field closed his letter with a request that an invitation should be extended to me, which I duly received.  This accounts for the reference to an approaching visit to Indianapolis in his letter of September 22d.

By the way, Field got more pleasure out of the various pronunciations of Goethe’s name than instruction from the perusal of his poems.  He was always starting or fostering discussions over it, as in the following paragraph: 

The valued New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme “Goethe” with “teeth” until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with “ity.”  This is hardly fair.  In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: 

    "Until at last John Wolfgang Goethe
    Was gathered home, upward of eighty."

To resume the Fredericton series of letters: 

  XI

  CHICAGO, Sunday the 26th, 1886.

Dear Boy:—­Such a close, muggy night this is that I feel little like writing to you or to anybody else.  Yet I am not one to neglect or shirk a duty.  I have been with Kate Field all the evening, and we have discussed everything from literature down to Sir Charles Dilke and back again.  A mighty smart woman is Kate!  My wife returned from St. Louis last Thursday, bringing about fifty of my books with her.  They were mostly of the Bohn’s Library series, but among them was a set of Boswell’s Johnson, Routledge edition of 1859.  I want you to have an edition of this kind, and I have sent to New York to see if it can be had (cheap).  I am reading like a race-horse.  The famous history of Dr. Faustus has done me a power of good, and I have been highly amused with a volume of Bohn which contains the old Ray proverbs.

Isn’t it about time for you to be getting back home?  You have been gone about sixteen days now, and we are growing more and more lonesome.  Peattie is looked for next Tuesday.  Mr. Stone goes out of town to-morrow—­to Dakota, I believe—­and is to be absent for a week also.  Shackelford will be back at work to-morrow.  You alone are delinquent.  Not only am I lonesome—­egad, I am starving!