"I'll see what I can do with the suggestion as to Jacob and Rachel. Several have asked me why I have never written any love-songs. That is hard to answer. I presume it is because I married so young. I was married at twenty-three, and did not begin to write until I was twenty-nine. Most of my lullabies are, in a sense, love-songs; so is 'To a Usurper,' 'A Valentine,' 'The Little Bit of a Woman,' 'Lovers' Lane,' etc., but not the kind commonly called love-songs. I am sending you herewith my first love-song, and even into it has crept a cadence that makes it a love-song of maturity rather than of youth. I do not know that you will care to have it, but it will interest you as the first....
"Ever sincerely yours,
"Eugene Field."
During the last years of his life, Bok tried to interest Benjamin Harrison, former President of the United States, in golf, since his physician had ordered "moderate outdoor exercise." Bok offered to equip him with the necessary clubs and balls. When he received the balls, the ex-president wrote:
"Thanks. But does not a bottle of liniment go with each ball?"
When William Howard Taft became President of the United States, the impression was given out that journalists would not be so welcome at the White House as they had been during the administration of President Roosevelt. Mr. Taft, writing to Bok about another matter, asked why he had not called and talked it over while in Washington. Bok explained the impression that was current; whereupon came the answer, swift and definite!
"There are no _personæ non gratæ_ at the White House. I long ago learned the waste of time in maintaining such a class."
There was in circulation during Henry Ward Beecher's lifetime a story, which is still revived every now and then, that on a hot Sunday morning in early summer, he began his sermon in Plymouth Church by declaring that "It is too damned hot to preach." Bok wrote to the great preacher, asked him the truth of this report, and received this definite denial:
"My Dear Friend:
"No, I never did begin a sermon with the remark that "it is d—d hot," etc. It is a story a hundred years old, revamped every few years to suit some new man. When I am dead and gone, it will be told to the rising generation respecting some other man, and then, as now, there will be fools who will swear that they heard it!