"Down by the lake?"

"Yes; we were cold, and we saw the smoke coming up from the lake, so
we went down there to get warm. And," he continued, in a
propitiatory tone, "we thought we'd catch some fish for supper."

"Fish?" exclaimed the mother.

"Yes; Melvin's comin' with the fish."

At this juncture the elder boy walked in triumphantly holding up a
dried herring tied to the end of a yard or so of twine.

That night, when the honest old gentleman reached home, the young
men got a warming without having to go to the steaming lake.

But all of Field's keen analytical comprehension of child-nature is
purified and exalted in his writings by his unalloyed reverence for
motherhood. The child is the theme, but it is almost always for the
mother he sings. Even here, however, he could not always resist the
temptation to relieve sentiment with a piece of humor, as in the
following clever congratulations to a friend on the birth of a son:

_A handsome and lively, though wee body
Is the son of my friend, Mrs. Peabody--
It affords me great joy
That her son is a boy,
And not an absurd little she-body._

More than thirty years since the late Professor John Fiske, when asked
to write out an account of his daily life for publication, did very
much the same thing as Field palmed off on his correspondents in his
"Auto-Analysis." He gave some "sure-enough" facts as to his birth,
education, and manner of life, but mixed in with the truth such a
medley of grotesque falsehoods about his habits of study, eating, and
drinking, that he supposed the whole farrago would be thrown into the
waste-paper basket. For thirty years he lived in the serene belief that
such had been its fate. But one day he was unpleasantly reminded of his
mistake. The old manuscript had been resurrected "from the worm-hole of
forgotten years," and he was published widecast as a glutton, not only
of work, but in eating, drinking, and sleeping. A man who defied all
the laws of hygiene, of moderation, and of rest. And when he died, from
heat prostration--an untimely death, that robbed his country of its
greatest student mind, while yet his energies were boundless--that
thoughtless story of thirty years ago was revived, to justify the "I
told you sos" of the public press.

His "Auto-Analysis" was not the only hoax of this description in which
Eugene Field indulged. In 1893 Hamlin Garland contributed an article to
M