lder sisters
should visit him during his college term and there meet and be
attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of
Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag
in Columbia? Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of
her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo. Besides, what interest
would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual
life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?

Out of the friendship of Eugene and Edgar and the visit of Edgar's
sisters to Columbia, fate was weaving a web for the unsuspecting
subject of this narrative which was not to be denied or altered by
leaving little Julia to rusticate at home like another pretty little
Cinderella. But this is not a fairy tale. It has no prince or glass
slippers or pumpkin coaches, with which Field's fancy could have
invested it. When the two friends separated on Commencement Day, after
Field had delivered an oration that impressed Miss Ida (Mrs. Below),
because of "his pale face and deep voice," a promise had been extorted
that he would visit the Comstocks in their home in St. Joseph.

In the usual course of human events nothing further of concern to us
would have come from the exchange of these common civilities of
student life. Edgar would have returned to his home and forgotten
Eugene, and Eugene would have gone his way and never known that Edgar
had a younger sister Julia sitting at the gate awaiting the coming of
her prince. But shortly after returning to St. Louis, Field was
inspired by his natural roving restlessness--the French call it
Fate--to run clear across the state of Missouri, some three hundred
miles, to see what kind of a town St. Joseph was and incidentally to
visit his college friend. Nearly twenty years later, in the gathering
gloom of a rented apartment in London, the still-constant lover wrote
of what happened when he first saw "Saint Jo, Buchanan County," in the
early seventies. There he first met "the brown-eyed maiden" of his
song, the Julia of numberless valentines that ran the gamut of grave
and gay through the intervening years, the heroine of frequent drives
which they "snailed along," as their proper horse went slow,

_In those leafy aisles, where Cupid smiles
In Lover's Lane, Saint Jo._

* * * * *

_Ah! sweet the hours of springtime
When the heart inclines to woo,
And it's deemed all right for the