y under date of
December 12th, 1891, I find him saying:

Just at present I am quite overwhelmed with work in the throes of a
Christmas story for the Daily News, my only story this year,
although I have had many applications for verse and prose. I have
promised a story to the Christian Union next Christmas. I have
delayed answering the letter you wrote to me some time ago, in the
hope that I should see my way clear to accepting your invitation.
Alas! I think it will be some time yet before I can visit St. Louis.
I am not well yet, and I actually dread going from home whilst
feeling ill. I improve in health, but the improvement is slow. I am
trying to abandon the tobacco habit. I find it a hard, hard
struggle.

Affectionately yours,

EUGENE FIELD.

By the time this letter was written, Field's Christmas stories
commanded almost any price in reason he was inclined to ask for
them--a condition far different from that which provoked his wrath and
scorn in the winter of 1886. That year his Christmas contribution to
the Morning News was "The Symbol and the Saint"--a story upon which he
expended a good month's spare time. In the same issue were
contributions from every member of the staff, excepting myself. In the
course of time each story-writer received the munificent sum of $15,
the author of the "Symbol and the Saint" the same as the reporter, who
turned in the thinnest, flimsiest sort of a sketch. It was a case of
levelling all down to a common standard, which Field did not relish.
He felt keenly the injustice of estimating the carefully finished
product of his month's labor at the same rate as the hurried and rough
journeyman work of a local hand, which had not cost more than an hour,
all told, in its conception and composition. "I think," he wrote
privately to Cowen, under date of January the 9th, 1887, "that things
have come to a sweet pass when my work, over which I have toiled for
more than three weeks, is to be estimated at the same rate as the
local hands." He registered no complaint to headquarters at the time,
but consoled himself with executing the following touching sketeh and
epitaph:

[Illustration: SKETCH AND EPITAPH.
_From a drawing by Eugene Field._

Here lies a mass of mouldering clay
Who sought in youth a path to glory,
But dies of age--without his pay
For writing of a Christmas story

1886.]

CHAPTER VII

IN THE SAINTS' AND SINNERS' CORNER