d had to seek the Western Union Telegraph
office to secure funds for the necessary transportation to St. Louis.
These Mr. Gray furnished so liberally that Eugene promptly invested
the surplus in a French poodle, which he carried in triumph back to
Missouri as a memento of his sojourn in Paris. This costly pet, the
sole exhibit of his foreign travel, he named McSweeny, in memory, I
suppose, of the pleasant days he had spent in Ireland.

[Illustration: MRS. MELVIN L. GRAY.]

Years afterward I remember to have been with Field when he opened a
package containing a watch, which for more than a decade had been an
unredeemed witness to his triumphant entry into and impecunious exit
from Naples or Florence--I forget which.

Mrs. Below, Field's sister-in-law, in her little brochure, "Eugene
Field in His Home," preserves a letter written by him from Rome to a
friend in Ireland, in which may be traced the bent of his mind to take
a whimsical view of all things coming within the range of his
observation. In this he bids farewell to political discussion:

For since the collapse of the Greeley and Brown movement I have given
over all hope of rescuing my torn and bleeding country from Grant and
his minions, and have resolved to have nothing more to do with
politics. Methinks, my country will groan to hear this declaration!

And there is the following description of how he was enjoying himself
in Italy, with the last remittances of his patrimony growing fewer and
painfully less:

We have been two months in Nice and a month or so travelling in
Italy. Two weeks we passed in Naples, and a most delightful place we
found it. Its natural situation is simply charming, though the
climate is said to be very unhealthy. I climbed Vesuvius and peered
cautiously into the crater. It was a glorious sight--nothing else
like it in the world! Such a glorious smell of brimstone! Such
enlivening whiffs of hot steam and sulphuric fumes! Then too the
grand veil of impenetrable white smoke that hung over the yawning
abyss! No wonder people rave about this crater and no wonder poor
Pliny lost his life coming too near the fascinating monster. The
ascent of Vesuvius is no mean undertaking, and I advise all American
parents to train their children especially for it by drilling them
daily upon their backyard ash-heaps.

His descent of Vesuvius was made "upon a dead run," and he "astonished
the natives by my [his] celerity