"Until at last John Wolfgang Goethe
Was gathered home, upward of eighty."
To resume the Fredericton series of letters:
XI
CHICAGO, Sunday the 26th, 1886.
Dear Boy:—Such a close, muggy night this is that I feel little like writing to you or to anybody else. Yet I am not one to neglect or shirk a duty. I have been with Kate Field all the evening, and we have discussed everything from literature down to Sir Charles Dilke and back again. A mighty smart woman is Kate! My wife returned from St. Louis last Thursday, bringing about fifty of my books with her. They were mostly of the Bohn's Library series, but among them was a set of Boswell's Johnson, Routledge edition of 1859. I want you to have an edition of this kind, and I have sent to New York to see if it can be had (cheap). I am reading like a race-horse. The famous history of Dr. Faustus has done me a power of good, and I have been highly amused with a volume of Bohn which contains the old Ray proverbs.
Isn't it about time for you to be getting back home? You have been gone about sixteen days now, and we are growing more and more lonesome. Peattie is looked for next Tuesday. Mr. Stone goes out of town to-morrow—to Dakota, I believe—and is to be absent for a week also. Shackelford will be back at work to-morrow. You alone are delinquent. Not only am I lonesome—egad, I am starving! So if you don't come in propria persona, at least send something. The old Dock has been as grumpy as a bear to-day and I have had a hard time bearing with him. He announced to me to-day that he thought that I was fickle—I tell you this so that you may repeat it to Miss Marie Mathilde, who, I believe, invented that opinion. Entre nous: Hawkins tells me that some of his friends are trying to buy the St. Paul Dispatch for him. There was a fire in the Chicago Opera House building to-night, but, unfortunately, no serious damage was done.
Stone is thinking of having the three of us—Dock, you and your habit—write a department for the Saturday News after the fashion of the Noctes. Think it all over whilst you are away. What are you going to bring me for a present? Don't go to buying any foolish trumpery; you have no money to waste on follies. What I need is a "Noctes," and any other useful book you may get hold of in New York. Love to the folks.
Ever yours,
FIELD.
The proposed "Noctes," except the set for Field, never materialized.