n of a youth of twenty. It is almost inconceivable where
Field found the time and strength for the whirl of work and play in
which there was no let up during his two years' stay in Denver. His
duties as managing editor of the Tribune would have taxed the energies
and resources of the strongest man, for he did not spare himself to
fulfil the purpose of his engagement--to make the paper "hum." He
mapped out and directed the work of the staff with a comprehensive
shrewdness and keen appreciation of what his public, as well as his
employers, wanted that left no room for criticism. He kept the whole
city guessing what sensation or reputation would be exploded next in
the Tribune.

But he did not confine himself to the duties of directing the work of
others. He started a column headed "Odds and Ends," to which he was the
principal and, by all odds, the most frequent contributor. He had not
been in the city many months before he began the occasional publication
of those skits which, under the title of "The Tribune Primer," were
gathered into his first unpretentious book of forty-eight pages, and
which in its original form is now one of the most sought after quarries
of the American bibliomaniac. Writing of these sketches in 1894, he
said:

The little sketches appeared in the Denver Tribune in the Fall of
1881 and winter of 1882. The whole number did not exceed fifty. I
quit writing them because all the other newspapers in the country
began imitating the project.

In fact the series began October 10th, 1881, and ended December 19th of
the same year. Edward B. Morgan, of Denver, in an introductory note to
a few of the sketches omitted from the original "Tribune Primer,"
printed in the Cornhill Booklet for January, 1901, gives the following
version of how the skits began:

Of the origin of these sketches a story is told--although the writer
cannot vouch for it--that on the Sunday evening preceding their first
publication the "printer's devil" was dispatched post-haste to
Field's home for copy which his happy-go-lucky manner of working had
not produced. We may perhaps picture him engaged in what was always
nearest and dearest to his heart, the amusement of his children, and
perhaps reading to them or more likely composing for them primer
sketches which he on the spur of the moment parodied for older
readers. He has probably expressed his own feelings in the third one
of the skits which he then wrot