We shall send the two copies of each volume (unnumbered) to secure the copyright, and when the certificate is received, will send it to you.  These copies are over and above the 250 copies sent to you.

Regretting the delay incident to the bringing out of two such volumes, and hoping that the author and his friends may be gratified and pleased with their mechanical execution, we are,

Respectfully yours,

JOHN WILSON & SON.

It is needless to say that both the author and his friends were gratified and pleased with the mechanical execution of the “Little Books,” while Field’s admirers have never wearied in their admiration of their contents.  Every cent of the fund subscribed for these books went to pay for their printing; and as Field started for Europe before they were received from Cambridge, the task of numbering them, as well as the cost of forwarding them to subscribers, fell to my lot.

These two books contained not only the best of what Field had written up to that time, but their contents were selected with such care that they continue to represent the best he ever wrote.  Much that he rejected at that time went to make up subsequent volumes of his works.  The popular editions from the subscription plates of “A Little Book of Western Verse” and “A Little Book of Profitable Tales” had a phenomenal sale, and made a handsome return in royalties to him who sent them forth with the words: 

  "Go, little book; and if any one would speak thee ill, let him
  bethink him that thou art the child of one who loves thee well."

CHAPTER VI

HIS SECOND VISIT TO EUROPE

From 1889 Field’s life was one long struggle with dyspepsia, an inherited weakness which he persisted in aggravating by indulgence in those twin enemies of health—­pastry and reading in bed.  During our intimate association I had exercised a wholesome restraint on his pie habit and reduced his hours of reading in bed to a minimum.  As the reader may remember, our pact concerned eating and walking.  When we ate, we talked, and while we walked, Field could not lie in bed browsing amid his favorite books, burning illuminating gas and the candle of life at the same time.  So long as his study of life was pursued among men he retained his health.  As soon as he began to retire more and more to the companionship of books and from the daily activities and associations of the newspaper office his assimilation of food failed to nourish his body as it did his brain.  The buoyancy went out of his step, but never out of his mind and heart.

As intimated in his letter to Mr. Gray, the publisher of the Daily News grew so solicitous over Field’s health that he proposed a three months’ European vacation, with pay, whenever he chose to take it.  At first it was not Field’s intention to avail himself of this generous offer until winter.  But when his “Little Books” were safely under way he changed his mind and decided to start as soon as he could arrange his household affairs.  In a letter to his friend Cowen, then in London, under date of June 11th, 1889, Field wrote: