Years afterward I remember to have been with Field when he opened a package containing a watch, which for more than a decade had been an unredeemed witness to his triumphant entry into and impecunious exit from Naples or Florence—I forget which.
Mrs. Below, Field's sister-in-law, in her little brochure, "Eugene Field in His Home," preserves a letter written by him from Rome to a friend in Ireland, in which may be traced the bent of his mind to take a whimsical view of all things coming within the range of his observation. In this he bids farewell to political discussion:
For since the collapse of the Greeley and Brown movement I have given over all hope of rescuing my torn and bleeding country from Grant and his minions, and have resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. Methinks, my country will groan to hear this declaration!
And there is the following description of how he was enjoying himself in Italy, with the last remittances of his patrimony growing fewer and painfully less:
We have been two months in Nice and a month or so travelling in Italy. Two weeks we passed in Naples, and a most delightful place we found it. Its natural situation is simply charming, though the climate is said to be very unhealthy. I climbed Vesuvius and peered cautiously into the crater. It was a glorious sight—nothing else like it in the world! Such a glorious smell of brimstone! Such enlivening whiffs of hot steam and sulphuric fumes! Then too the grand veil of impenetrable white smoke that hung over the yawning abyss! No wonder people rave about this crater and no wonder poor Pliny lost his life coming too near the fascinating monster. The ascent of Vesuvius is no mean undertaking, and I advise all American parents to train their children especially for it by drilling them daily upon their backyard ash-heaps.
His descent of Vesuvius was made "upon a dead run," and he "astonished the natives by my [his] celerity and recklessness."
This letter was written on Washington's birthday, 1873, and in later years the omission of any reference to the anniversary would have thrown suspicion on its genuineness; but Field had not yet begun to reckon life by anniversaries. Neither is there in it a shadow of the impending crisis in his finances nor a suggestion of another reason that robbed his return voyage of all distressing thoughts of retreat.
CHAPTER VII