ay nights that best of men--
Her husband--drew his pay.

And often, when the good knight craved
A dime wherewith he might get shaved,
She doled him out the same;
For these and other generous deeds
The good and honest knight must needs
Have loved the kindly dame.

At all events, he never strayed
From those hymeneal vows he made
When their two loves combined;
A matron more discreet than she
Or husband more devote than he
It would be hard to find.

July 4th, 1885._

And so in very sooth it would have been. Under what circumstances and
with what purpose Field wrote this I cannot now recall, if I ever
knew. Nothing like it exists among my many manuscripts of his. It is
written in pencil on what appears to be a sheet from a pad of ledger
paper, watermarked "1879," a fact I mention for the benefit of his
bibliomaniac admirers. And, what is most peculiar, it is written on
both sides of the sheet--something most unusual with Field, except in
correspondence--where the economy of the old half ounce three-cent
postage and his New England training prevailed over his disposition to
be lavish with paper if not with ink. Anyway, Field's "Good Knight and
His Lady" gives a clearer insight into his home relations than any
other thing that has been preserved respecting them. That it was
prepared with care is witnessed by several interlineations in ink,
sealed by a blot of his favorite red ink on the corner, which for a
wonder does not bear the marks of the deliberate blemishes with which
he frequently embellished his neatest manuscripts.

CHAPTER VIII

EARLY EXPERIENCES IN JOURNALISM

Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter,
there is not the shadow of a tradition that he made any more progress
along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as
a student at Williams. He had too many grotesque fancies dancing
through his whimsical brain to make account or "copy" of the plain
ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of
the average reporter's day. What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or
Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was
sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that
attracted readers. The peculiarities and not the conventions of life
appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that
lasted while he lived. Thu