And of all his visitors the most constant and appreciative were children.  These he never sent away without some bright word, and he rarely sent them away at all.  Nowhere could they find such an entertaining playmate as he—­one who would tell them such wonderful stories and make up such funny rhymes for them on the spur of the moment, and romp with them like one of themselves.  It was in the homely incidents of these visits, and the like intimacy with his own children, that he found the subjects for his poems.  He could voice the feelings of a child, because he knew child life from always living it.

On his own children he bestowed pet names—­“Pinney,” “Daisy,” “Googhy,” “Posey,” and “Trotty;” and they almost forgot that they had others.  His eldest daughter, for instance, now a lovely girl of nineteen, has remained “Trotty” from her babyhood, and “Trotty” she will always be.  At her christening Field had an argument with his wife about the name they should give her.  Mrs. Field wished her to be called Frances, to which Field objected on the ground that it would be shortened into Frankie, which he disliked.  Then other names were suggested, and, after listening to this one and that one, Field finally said:  “You can christen her whatever you please, but I shall call her Trotty.”  “Pinney” was named from the comic opera “Pinafore,” which was in vogue at the time he was born; and “Daisy” got his name from the song, popular when he was born:  “Oh My!  A’int He a Daisy?”

A devotion so unfailing in his relations with children would, naturally, show itself in other relations.  His devotion to his wife, for example, was of the completest.  In all the world she was the one woman he loved, and he never wished to be away from her.  In one of his scrap-books, under her picture, are written these lines: 

  You are as fair and sweet and tender,
  Dear brown-eyed little sweetheart mine! 
  As when, a callow youth and slender,
  I asked to be your valentine.

Often she accompanied him on his readings.  Last summer it happened that they went together to St. Joe, Missouri, the home of Mrs. Field’s girlhood.  On their arrival, Mrs. Field’s friends took possession of her and carried her off to a lunch-party, where it was arranged that Mr. Field should join her later.  But he, left alone, was swept by his thoughts back to the time when, a youth of twenty-one, he had here paid court to the woman now his wife, then a girl of sixteen; and so affected was he by these memories that, instead of going to the lunch-party, he took a carriage, and all alone drove to the places which he and she had been wont to visit in the happy time of their love-making, especially to a certain lover’s lane where they had taken many a walk together.

[Illustration:  The last portrait of Eugene field.

From a copyrighted photograph by Place & Coover, Chicago; reproduced by permission of the Etching Publishing Co., Chicago.]