My newspaper connections have been as follows: 1875-76, city editor of the St. Joseph (Mo.) _Gazette_; 1876-80, editorial writer on the St. Louis _Journal_ and St. Louis _Times-Journal_; 1880-81, managing editor of the Kansas City Times; 1881-83, managing editor of the Denver _Tribune_. Since 1883 I have been a contributor to the Chicago Record (formerly _Morning News_).[143] His success with the Denver _Tribune_, to which he contributed such widely copied work as that published in his first thin volume, _The Tribune Primer_ (1882), attracted attention. He began to receive offers from Eastern papers, one at least from Dana, editor of the New York _Sun_, but it was not until Melville E. Stone offered him the humorous column of his paper, the Chicago _News_, that Field decided to turn eastward. He had begun to dream of a literary career and this dream, always a vague one, for he was chained by poverty to a tyrannical profession, seemed more possible in a less tense atmosphere than that of the Western mining center. Arriving at Chicago in 1883, he set out to make his new column a thing with distinction. _Flats and Sharps_ was the name he gave it, and into it he poured a mélange of all things: poetry in every key, paragraphs on all subjects, parodies, hoaxes, mock reviews, pseudo news, personals, jokes--everything. He threw himself completely into the thing: it became his life work; "practically everything he ever wrote appeared at one time or another in that column." But newspaper humor usually perishes with the flimsy leaves upon which it is recorded. Not until Field had written "Little Boy Blue" in 1887 did he become at all known to the reading public. The publication of the popular editions of _A Little Book of Profitable Tales_ and _A Little Book of Western Verse_ in 1890, only five years before his death, marks, perhaps, the time of his general acceptation as a writer. Hardly had the public learned to know him before they were called upon to mourn his early death. Indeed, the work by which he is now best known was done almost all of it in the last six or seven years of his life. It was only in this brief later period that he was a "bibliomaniac" or a lover of Horace or a student of the old English ballads.