DEAR MR. GRAY:  I send herewith copies of poems which have appeared in the Daily News this week.  I am proud to have been the first newspaper man to have made the record of a column of original verse every day for a week; I am greatly mistaken if this feeling of pardonable pride is not shared by you.  I regard some of the poems as my best work so far, but I shall do better yet if my life is spared.  We are rusticating here by the side of a Wisconsin lake this summer.  Farm board seems to agree with us and we shall in all likelihood remain here until September.  I have been grievously afflicted with nervous dyspepsia for a month, but am much better just now.  The paper gives me a three months’ European vacation whensoever I wish to go.  At present I intend to go in the winter and shall take Julia and Mary (Trotty) with me.  I do wish that Mrs. Gray would write to me; I want to know all about her home affairs and especially about Mrs. Bacon—­my grudge against her in re mince pie has expired under the statute of limitations.  God bless you, dear friend—­you and yours,

  Affectionately,

  EUGENE FIELD.

Although Field’s body was rusticating on farm fare in Wisconsin, his pen was furnishing its two thousand three hundred words a day to the Daily News, as the “Sharps and Flats” column through the summer of 1889 shows.  In a letter written from the Benedict Farm during the Golden Week to Cowen, who was at this time in London working on the English edition of the New York Herald, Field unfolds some of his doings and plans: 

The copies of the London Herald came to hand to-day; I am sure I am very much indebted to you for the boom you are giving me; it is of distinct value to me, and I appreciate it.  I send you herewith a number of my verses that have appeared this week in my column.  Having done my work ahead I am rusticating in great shape and have become a veritable terror to the small fry in which the lakes of this delectable locality abound.  My books will be issued about the first of August; they will be very pretty pieces of work; I shall send you a set at once.  My western verse seems to be catching on; I notice that a good many others of the boys are striking out in the same vein.  Young McCarthy has made a translation from the Persian, and I have half a notion to paraphrase parts of it.  I want to dip around in all sorts of versification, simply to show people that determination and perseverance can accomplish much in this direction.  You know that I do not set much store by “genius.”

The books to which Field refers as likely to be issued about the first of August were his two “Little Books” of verse and tales, the copy for which had not, when he wrote the foregoing, all gone to the printer.  His idea then was that a book could be got out with something like the same lightning dispatch as a daily newspaper.