Or husband more devote than he
It would be hard to find.
July 4th, 1885
And so in very sooth it would have been. Under what circumstances and with what purpose Field wrote this I cannot now recall, if I ever knew. Nothing like it exists among my many manuscripts of his. It is written in pencil on what appears to be a sheet from a pad of ledger paper, watermarked "1879," a fact I mention for the benefit of his bibliomaniac admirers. And, what is most peculiar, it is written on both sides of the sheet—something most unusual with Field, except in correspondence—where the economy of the old half ounce three-cent postage and his New England training prevailed over his disposition to be lavish with paper if not with ink. Anyway, Field's "Good Knight and His Lady" gives a clearer insight into his home relations than any other thing that has been preserved respecting them. That it was prepared with care is witnessed by several interlineations in ink, sealed by a blot of his favorite red ink on the corner, which for a wonder does not bear the marks of the deliberate blemishes with which he frequently embellished his neatest manuscripts.
CHAPTER VIII
EARLY EXPERIENCES IN JOURNALISM
Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of a tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams. He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or "copy" of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter's day. What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers. The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived. Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature. I wonder why I wrote "western" when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado? From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois. He was a looker-on in the legislative halls, and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw. Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire.
There was little about his work at this time that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher. Looking back it is possible, however, to discover something of the flavor of the inextinguishable drollery that persisted to his last printed work in such verses as these in the St. Louis Journal:
THE NEW BABY