This is no better verse, and possibly no worse, than much of the adolescent doggerel that is so often preserved by fond parents to prove that their child early gave signs of poetic and literary genius.
CHAPTER VI
CHOICE OF A PROFESSION
Eugene Field was in his twenty-first year when he turned his back upon the colleges and faced life. Roswell M. Field, Sr., had been dead two years, and the moderate fortune which he had left, consisting mostly of realty valued at about $60,000, had not yet been distributed among the legatees, Eugene and Roswell M. Field and Mary French Field. To the last named one-fifth had been willed in recognition of the loving care she had bestowed upon the testator's two motherless sons, each of whom was to receive two-fifths of the father's estate. Eugene therefore looked forward to the possession of property worth something like $25,000. In St. Louis, in 1871, this was regarded as quite a large fortune. It would have been ample to start any young man, with prudence, regular habits, and a small modicum of business sense, well along in any profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature.
On first going to St. Louis to live, Eugene Field was peculiarly fortunate in being taken into the home and enduring friendship of Melvin L. Gray, the executor of his father's estate, and of Mrs. Gray. To the memory of the latter, on her death several years since, Eugene contributed a memorial from which I have already quoted and which in some respects is the most sincerely beautiful piece of prose he ever wrote. In that he refers to his first coming to St. Louis in the following terms:
My acquaintance with Mrs. Gray began in 1871. I was at that time just coming of age, and there were many reasons why I was attracted to the home over which this admirable lady presided. In the first-place Mrs. Gray's household was a counterpart of the households to which my boyhood life in New England had attracted me. Again both Mr. and Mrs. Gray were old friends of my parents; and upon Mr. Gray's accepting the executorship of my father's estate, Mrs. Gray felt, I am pleased to believe, somewhat more than a friendly interest in the two boys, who, coming from rural New England life into the great, strange, fascinating city, stood in need of disinterested friendship and prudent counsel. I speak for my brother and myself when I say that for the period of twenty years we found in Mrs. Gray a friend as indulgent, as forbearing, as sympathetic, as kindly suggestive and as disinterested as a mother, and in her home a refuge from temptation, care and vexation.