his sporadic hair--
She knew his hymns by rote;
They longed to dine together
At Casey's table d'hote;
Alas, that Fortune's "hostages"--
But let us draw a screen!
He dared not call her Katie;
How _could_ she call him "Gene?"

I signed my verses "By one of Gene's Victims"; they appeared in _The
Tribune_, and soon were copied by papers in every part of the country.
Other stanzas, with the same refrain, were added by the funny men of
the southern and western press, and it was months before 'Gene' saw the
last of them. The word "Eugenio," which was the name by which I always
addressed him in our correspondence, left him in no doubt as to the
initiator of the series, and so our "Merry War" ended, I think, with a
fair quittance to either side.

Grieving, with so many others, over Yorick's premature death, it is a
solace for me to remember how pleasant was our last interchange of
written words. Not long ago, he was laid very low by pneumonia, but
recovered, and before leaving his sickroom wrote me a sweetly serious
letter--with here and there a sparkle in it--but in a tone sobered by
illness, and full of yearning for a closer companionship with his
friends. At the same time he sent me the first editions, long ago
picked up, of all my earlier books, and begged me to write on their
fly-leaves. This I did; with pains to gratify him as much as possible,
and in one of the volumes wrote this little quatrain:

TO EUGENE FIELD

Death thought to claim you in this year of years,
But Fancy cried--and raised her shield between--
"Still let men weep, and smile amid their tears;
Take any two beside, but spare Eugene!"

In view of his near escape, the hyperbole, if such there was, might
well be pardoned, and it touched Eugene so manifestly that--now that
the eddy indeed has swept him away, and the Sabine Farm mourns for its
new-world Horace--I cannot be too thankful that such was my last
message to him.

Eugene Field was so mixed a compound that it will always be impossible
quite to decide whether he was wont to judge critically of either his
own conduct or his literary creations. As to the latter, he put the
worst and the best side by side, and apparently cared alike for both.
That he did much beneath his standard, fine and true at times,--is
unquestionable, and many a set of verses went the rounds that harmed
his reputation. On the whole, I think this was due to the fact that he
got his