to
draw in advance from the cashier almost every week.

Before the newspaper cashier had risen as a life-saving station on the
horizon of Eugene Field's constant impecuniosity, his father's
executor, Mr. Gray, had been the object of his intermittent appeals
for funds to meet pressing needs. The means he invented to wheedle the
generous, but methodical, executor out of these appropriations
afforded Field more genuine pleasure than the success that attended
them. The coin they yielded passed through his fingers like water
through a sieve, but the enjoyment of his happy schemes abided in his
memory and also in that of his constant friend always. One of Field's
most effective methods of securing an advance from Mr. Gray was the
threat of going on the stage under the assumed name of Melvin L. Gray.
On one occasion Field approached him for money for living expenses,
and being met with what appeared to be an unrelenting negative, coolly
said: "Very well, if you cannot advance it to me out of the estate I
shall be compelled to go on the stage. But as I cannot keep my own
name I have decided to assume yours, and shall have lithographs struck
off at once. They will read, 'To-night, M.L. Gray, Banjo and Specialty
Artist.'" It is needless to say that the much-needed funds were found.
But whether they went to the payment of living expenses, to the
importunity of some threatening creditor, or were divided between the
joys of the bibliomaniac and the bon vivant, Field in his most
confiding humor never disclosed to me.

But this I know, that one of these always respectful, if apparently
threatening, appeals to Mr. Gray, was the basis for one of the few
newspaper attacks on Eugene Field that he resented deeply. Some time
after he had left St. Louis and was engaged on the Denver Tribune, the
Spectator, a weekly paper of the former city, contained the following
gossip regarding him which was written in a thoughtless rather than an
intentionally inimical spirit:

One of the cleverest young journalists of this city, a few years ago,
was Mr. Eugene Field, whose charming short poems and witty paragraphs
still occasionally find their way into our paper from Denver, where he
is now located. Mr. Field was the happy possessor of one of those
sunny dispositions which is thoroughly antagonistic to trouble of
every description; he absolutely refused to entertain the black demon
under any pretext whatever, and after spending a small fortune with