flout and trample on the most sensitive sensibilities of the South.  In the meantime Mr. Kohlsaat’s office was besieged by the friends of colored aspirants to the vice-presidency, and Field chuckled in his chair and took every opportunity to add fuel to his confrere’s embarrassment and to the flame of Southern indignation.  All the while he would meet Mr. Kohlsaat, who was one of his intimate friends, and express to him astonishment that he should feel any annoyance over such a palpable, harmless pleasantry.

Although there is one bit of verse in the foregoing sample column of Field’s political paragraphs, it does scant justice to his most effective weapon.  His political jingles were the delight or vexation of partisans as they happened to ridicule or scarify this side or that.  He was on terms of personal friendship with General John A. Logan, whose admiration for General Grant he shared to the fullest degree.  But this never restrained Field from taking all sorts of waggish liberties with General Logan’s well-known fondness for mixed metaphors and other perversions of the Queen’s English.  The general, on one occasion, in a burst of eloquence, had spoken of “the day when the bloody hand of rebellion stalked through the land”; and for a year thereafter that “bloody hand” “stalked” through Field’s column.  He enjoyed attributing to General Logan all sorts of literary undertakings.  Among others, was the writing of a play, to which reference is made in the following paragraph: 

Senator John A. Logan’s play, “The Spy,” is in great demand, a number of theatrical speculators having entered the lists for it, the managers for the Madison Square and Union Square theatres being specially eager to get hold of it.  A gentleman who is in the author’s confidence assures us he has read the play, and can testify to its high dramatic merits.  “It will have to be rewritten,” said he, “for Logan has thrown it together with characteristic looseness; but it is full of lively dialogue and exciting situations.  In the hands of a thorough playwright it would become a splendid melodrama.”  The play treats upon certain incidents of the late Civil War, and the romantic experiences of a certain Major Algernon Bellville, U.S.A., who is beloved by Maud Glynne, daughter of a Confederate general.  The plot turns upon the young lady’s unsuccessful effort to convey intelligence of a proposed sortie to her lover in the Union ranks.  She is slain while masking in male attire by Reginald De Courcey, a rejected lover, who is serving as her father’s aide-de-camp.  This melancholy tragedy is enacted at a spot appointed by the lovers as a rendezvous.  Major Bellville rushes in to find his fair idol a corpse.  He is wild with grief.  The melodrama concludes thus: 

  De Bell—­Aha!  Who done this deed?

  Lieutenant Smythe—­Yonder Reginald De Courcey done it, for I seen
  him when he done it.

  Reginald—­’Sdeath!  ’Tis a lie upon my honor.  I didn’t do no such
  thing.