and while he posted
fifteen hundred miles and returned with barely time, if all
connections served, to catch the steamer.

Field never dreamed of fulfilling that condition of his probation
which required him to become established in business. If he had done
so the date of his marriage would have been indefinitely postponed. He
returned from Europe, as we have seen, sans the better part of his
patrimony, in the spring of 1873, and instead of attempting to
establish himself in business, immediately set himself to secure an
abridgment of his term of waiting. The years between fourteen and
eighteen run slow. To every true lover Time moves with leaden feet. As
Rosalind tells us, "Marry, he trots hard with a young maid between the
contract of her marriage and the day it is solemnized: if the interim
be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that it seems the length of
seven year." What wonder then if the four years they were pledged to
wait seemed an eternity, and that both set themselves to abridge it by
all the arts and persuasion of young lovers. They pleaded and
contrived so cunningly and successfully that the obdurate parents
finally acceded to their wishes, and Eugene Field and Julia Sutherland
Comstock were married at St. Joseph on October 16th, 1873. The bride
"at that time was a girl of sixteen," is the laconic and only comment
of the "Auto-Analysis." This he supplemented with the further
information, "we have had eight children--three daughters and five
sons."

[Illustration: MRS. EUGENE FIELD.]

But this is jumping from Saint Jo into the future more than a score of
years in advance of our story. The young couple spent their honeymoon
in the East. Field took especial delight in showing his bride of
sixteen the wonders of New York and in playing practical jokes upon
her unsophisticated nature, thereby keeping her in a perpetual state
of amazement or of terror as to what he would do next. He sought to
make her at home at Delmonico's by ordering "boiled pig's feet a la
Saint Jo," with a gravity of countenance that tested the solemnity of
the waiters and provoked the protest, "Oh, Eugene!" that was to be the
feminine accompaniment to his boyish humor throughout their married
life. No matter how often Field played his antics before or on his
wife, they always seemed to take her by surprise and evoked a
remonstrance in which pride over his mirthfulness mollified all
displeasure.

By the time Field returned to St. L