ustration: STATE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS AT COLUMBIA, MO.]

CHAPTER VI

CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

Eugene Field was in his twenty-first year when he turned his back upon
the colleges and faced life. Roswell M. Field, Sr., had been dead two
years, and the moderate fortune which he had left, consisting mostly of
realty valued at about $60,000, had not yet been distributed among the
legatees, Eugene and Roswell M. Field and Mary French Field. To the
last named one-fifth had been willed in recognition of the loving care
she had bestowed upon the testator's two motherless sons, each of whom
was to receive two-fifths of the father's estate. Eugene therefore
looked forward to the possession of property worth something like
$25,000. In St. Louis, in 1871, this was regarded as quite a large
fortune. It would have been ample to start any young man, with
prudence, regular habits, and a small modicum of business sense, well
along in any profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and
would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount,
unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a
pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift
nature.

On first going to St. Louis to live, Eugene Field was peculiarly
fortunate in being taken into the home and enduring friendship of
Melvin L. Gray, the executor of his father's estate, and of Mrs. Gray.
To the memory of the latter, on her death several years since, Eugene
contributed a memorial from which I have already quoted and which in
some respects is the most sincerely beautiful piece of prose he ever
wrote. In that he refers to his first coming to St. Louis in the
following terms:

My acquaintance with Mrs. Gray began in 1871. I was at that time just
coming of age, and there were many reasons why I was attracted to the
home over which this admirable lady presided. In the first-place Mrs.
Gray's household was a counterpart of the households to which my
boyhood life in New England had attracted me. Again both Mr. and Mrs.
Gray were old friends of my parents; and upon Mr. Gray's accepting
the executorship of my father's estate, Mrs. Gray felt, I am pleased
to believe, somewhat more than a friendly interest in the two boys,
who, coming from rural New England life into the great, strange,
fascinating city, stood in need of disinterested friendship and
prudent counsel. I speak for my brother and myself w