n he bestowed pet names--"Pinney," "Daisy,"
"Googhy," "Posey," and "Trotty;" and they almost forgot that they
had others. His eldest daughter, for instance, now a lovely girl of
nineteen, has remained "Trotty" from her babyhood, and "Trotty" she
will always be. At her christening Field had an argument with his
wife about the name they should give her. Mrs. Field wished her to be
called Frances, to which Field objected on the ground that it would
be shortened into Frankie, which he disliked. Then other names were
suggested, and, after listening to this one and that one, Field
finally said: "You can christen her whatever you please, but I shall
call her Trotty." "Pinney" was named from the comic opera "Pinafore,"
which was in vogue at the time he was born; and "Daisy" got his name
from the song, popular when he was born: "Oh My! A'int He a Daisy?"

A devotion so unfailing in his relations with children would,
naturally, show itself in other relations. His devotion to his wife,
for example, was of the completest. In all the world she was the one
woman he loved, and he never wished to be away from her. In one of his
scrap-books, under her picture, are written these lines:

You are as fair and sweet and tender,
Dear brown-eyed little sweetheart mine!
As when, a callow youth and slender,
I asked to be your valentine.

Often she accompanied him on his readings. Last summer it happened
that they went together to St. Joe, Missouri, the home of Mrs. Field's
girlhood. On their arrival, Mrs. Field's friends took possession of
her and carried her off to a lunch-party, where it was arranged that
Mr. Field should join her later. But he, left alone, was swept by his
thoughts back to the time when, a youth of twenty-one, he had here
paid court to the woman now his wife, then a girl of sixteen; and
so affected was he by these memories that, instead of going to the
lunch-party, he took a carriage, and all alone drove to the places
which he and she had been wont to visit in the happy time of their
love-making, especially to a certain lover's lane where they had taken
many a walk together.

[Illustration: THE LAST PORTRAIT OF EUGENE FIELD.

From a copyrighted photograph by Place & Coover, Chicago; reproduced
by permission of the Etching Publishing Co., Chicago.]

The day before Field's death the mail brought a hundred dollars in
payment for a magazine article he had written. It was in small bills,
and there was quite a quant