My wife will be back to-morrow evening; as I am to meet her at the station, I may not have time to write you your daily note. She writes me that she has had a bad cold ever since she reached St. Louis and is heartily glad that she is coming home. Dunlap, of the McCaul Company, invites me to be his guest at the Southern Hotel while the company sings in St. Louis, but that sort of thing is out of the question. Do you intend to go to Indianapolis with me? E—— W—— has been very friendly of late. I suspect he is getting hard up. B——'s latest fad is to organize a Friday night club to discuss literature, art, science, etc. Hearing him talk about it to-day gave the old Dock a violent attack of nausea. Speaking of nausea reminds me that P—— has been seriously indisposed for two days as the consequence of eating nine peaches, two apples, and a pound of grapes! He is satisfied, however, that this variable fall weather is very trying. Shackelford is off on his vacation, but I do not complain, since I find Rogers, his substitute, a pleasant gentleman to do Saturday business with....
Affectionately yours,
EUGENE FIELD.
An interesting point in this letter is its reference to his proposed first appearance as a reader after coming to Chicago before the convention of Western Association of Writers at Indianapolis. Previous to this, during our acquaintance he had repeatedly declined requests to appear upon the platform. But in this case he was persuaded by Richard Lew Dawson, the secretary of the association, to make an exception in its favor. In a letter to Mr. Dawson, under date of September 3d, 1886, Field gives the following interesting estimate of some of his own work:
"Since reading your last letter, I have thought that it might be wise for me to contribute to your programme the following pieces, which exhibit pretty nearly all styles of my work:
| 1. | Death and the Soldier | Prose. | 10 minutes. |
| 2. | The Humane Lad (new) | Verse. | 3 minutes |
| 3. | The Noontide Hymn (new) | Verse. | 3 minutes |
| 4. | The Merciful Lad (new) | Verse. | 2 minutes |
| 5. | The Divine Lullaby (new) | Verse. | 2 minutes. |
"The reading of these pieces will require not more than twenty minutes, and I would prefer to give them consecutively. Numbers 2 and 4 are humorous. I do not like 'Death and the Soldier' as much as 'The First Christmas Tree,' the 'Robin and the Violet,' or 'The Mountain and the Sea'—I mean I do not like it so much as a piece of fanciful literary work, but it may be more catchy. You know what your audience will like, and I leave the matter in your hands."
Field closed his letter with a request that an invitation should be extended to me, which I duly received. This accounts for the reference to an approaching visit to Indianapolis in his letter of September 22d.
By the way, Field got more pleasure out of the various pronunciations of Goethe's name than instruction from the perusal of his poems. He was always starting or fostering discussions over it, as in the following paragraph:
The valued New York Life asserts that Chicago used to rhyme "Goethe" with "teeth" until the Renaissance set in, since which epoch it has rhymed it with "ity." This is hardly fair. In a poem read recently before the Hyde Park Toboggan Slide Lyceum the following couplet occurred: