nver when his pen or his restless spirit
for mischief did not provide some fresh cause for local amazement or
merriment. His associates and abettors in all manner of frolics, where
he was master of the revels, were kindred spirits among the railway
managers, agents, politicians, mining speculators, lawyers, and doctors
of the town. Into this company a fresh ingredient would be introduced
every week from the theatrical troupes which made Denver the western
limit of their circuits or a convenient break in the long overland
jump.

Field's office was a fitting retreat for the genius of disorder. It had
none of the conveniences that are supposed to be necessary in the rooms
of modern managing editors. It was open and accessible to the public
without the intermediary of an office-boy or printer's devil. Field had
his own way of making visitors welcome, whether they came in friendly
guise or on hostile measures bent. Over his desk hung the inhospitable
sign, "This is my busy day," which he is said to have invented, and on
the neighboring wall the motto, "God bless our proof-reader, He can't
call for him too soon." But his crudest device, "fatal," as his friend
E.D. Cowen writes, "to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a
threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of
those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless
black-walnut chair." Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few
exchanges carelessly thrown there--the floor being also liberally
strewn with them. As it was the only chair in the room except the one
Field occupied himself, his caller, though never asked to do so, would
be sure to see in Field's suave smile an invitation to drop into the
trap and thence ingloriously to the floor. Through this famous chair,
on his first visit to the Tribune office, "Bill" Nye dropped into a
lifelong friendship with Eugene Field. When the victim happened to be
an angry sufferer from a too personal reference to his affairs in the
paper, Field would make the most profuse apologies for the scant
furnishings of the office, which he shrewdly ascribed to the poverty of
the publishing company, and tender his own chair as some small
compensation for the mishap.

I have spoken of Edgar W.--more familiarly known as "Bill"--Nye's
unceremonious introduction to Field's friendship. This followed upon
what was virtually the discovery of Nye by Field. The former was what
old-time printers de