Toward the close of August of the present year my brother wrote the first chapter of ``The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.’’ At that time he was in an exhausted physical condition and apparently unfit for any protracted literary labor.  But the prospect of gratifying a long-cherished ambition, the delight of beginning the story he had planned so hopefully, seemed to give him new strength, and he threw himself into the work with an enthusiasm that was, alas, misleading to those who had noted fearfully his declining vigor of body.  For years no literary occupation had seemed to give him equal pleasure, and in the discussion of the progress of his writing from day to day his eye would brighten, all of his old animation would return, and everything would betray the lively interest he felt in the creature of his imagination in whom he was living over the delights of the book-hunter’s chase.  It was his ardent wish that this work, for the fulfilment of which he had been so long preparing, should be, as he playfully expressed it, a monument of apologetic compensation to a class of people he had so humorously maligned, and those who knew him intimately will recognize in the shortcomings of the bibliomaniac the humble confession of his own weaknesses.

It is easy to understand from the very nature of the undertaking that it was practically limitless; that a bibliomaniac of so many years’ experience could prattle on indefinitely concerning his ``love affairs,’’ and at the same time be in no danger of repetition.  Indeed my brother’s plans at the outset were not definitely formed.  He would say, when questioned or joked about these amours, that he was in the easy position of Sam Weller when he indited his famous valentine, and could ``pull up’’ at any moment.  One week he would contend that a book-hunter ought to be good for a year at least, and the next week he would argue as strongly that it was time to send the old man into winter quarters and go to press.  But though the approach of cold weather increased his physical indisposition, he was not the less interested in his prescribed hours of labor, howbeit his weakness warned him that he should say to his book, as his much-loved Horace had written: 

``Fuge quo descendere gestis: 
Non erit emisso reditis tibi.’’

Was it strange that his heart should relent, and that he should write on, unwilling to give the word of dismissal to the book whose preparation had been a work of such love and solace?

During the afternoon of Saturday, November 2, the nineteenth instalment of ``The Love Affairs’’ was written.  It was the conclusion of his literary life.  The verses supposably contributed by Judge Methuen’s friend, with which the chapter ends, were the last words written by Eugene Field.  He was at that time apparently quite as well as on any day during the fall months, and neither he nor any member of his family had the slightest premonition that death was hovering about the household.