details the fate of a "Rat" printer, who,
in addition to the mortal offence of "spacing out agate" type with
brevier, sealed his doom by stepping on the tail of our old friend,
the French poodle McSweeny. The execution of the victim's sentence
was described as follows:

_His body in the fatal cannon then they force
Shouting erstwhile in accents madly hoarse,
"Death to all Rats"--the fatal match is struck,
The cannon pointed upwards--then kerchuck!
Fiz! Snap! Ker--boom! Slug 14's grotesque form
Sails out to ride a race upon the storm,
Up through the roof, and up into the sky--
As if he sought for "cases" up on high,
Till like a rocket, or like one who's trusted,
He fell again to earth--completely busted._

There is not much suggestion, or even promise, in this doggerel, of
the Eugene Field whose verses of occasion were destined within a dozen
years to be sought for in every newspaper office in America.

Long before Field learned the value of his time and writing, he began
to appreciate the value of printer's ink and showed much shrewdness in
courting its favor. He did not wait for chance to bring his wares into
notice, but early joined the circle of busy paragraphers who formed a
wider, if less distinguished, mutual admiration society than that
free-masonry of authorship which at one time almost limited literary
fame in the United States to Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles
Dudley Warner, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Robert J. Burdette is about
the only survivor of the coterie of paragraphers, who, a quarter of a
century ago, made such papers as the Burlington Hawkeye, the Detroit
Free Press, the Oil City Derrick, the Danbury News, and the Cincinnati
Saturday Night, widely quoted throughout the Union for their clever
squibs and lively sallies. Field put himself in the way of the
reciprocating round of mutual quotation and spicy comment, and before
he left St. Louis his "Funny Fancies" in the Times-Journal had the
approval of his fellow-jesters if they could not save that paper from
its approaching doom.

Before leaving St. Louis, however, Eugene Field was to strike one of
the notes that was to vibrate so sweetly and surely to his touch unto
the end. He had lost one baby son in St. Jo, and Melvin was a mere
large-eyed infant when his father was moved at Christmas-time, 1878,
to write his "Christmas Treasures," which he frequently, though
incorrectly, declared to be "the first verse I ever