When you have mingled the simple, bald, and often beautiful pathos of this old balladry with the fancies of fairy-land which Field invented, or borrowed from Hans Andersen's tales, you have the key to much of the best poetry and prose he ever wrote. The secret of his undying attachment to Bohn's Standard Library was that therein he found almost every book that introduced him to the masters of the kind of English literature that most appealed to him. Here he unearthed the best of the ancients in literal English garb, from Æschylus to Xenophon, to say nothing of a dictionary of Latin and of Greek quotations done into English with an index verborum. More to the purpose still, Bohn put into his hands Smart's translation of Horace, "carefully revised by an Oxonian." In the cheap, uniform green cloth of Bohn, he fell in with Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English," Bell's "Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England," Bede's "Ecclesiastical History," Marco Polo's "Travels," Keightly's "Fairy Mythology," and renewed his acquaintance with Andersen's "Danish Legends and Fairy Tales," and Grimm's "Fairy Tales," and last, but not least, with one of the best editions of Isaac Walton's "Complete Angler," wherein he did some of his best fishing. It has been a common impression that Field was attracted to the old-book corner of McClurg's store by the old and rare books displayed there. These were not for him, as he had not then learned that bibliomania could be made to put money in his purse or to wing his shafts of irony with feathers from its favorite nest. He went to browse among the dark green covers of Bohn and remained years after to prey upon the dry husks of the bibliomaniacs. Among the cherished relics of those days there lies before me as I write "The Book of British Ballads," edited by S.C. Hall, inscribed on the title page: "_Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit._" To Slason Thompson from Eugene Field. Christmas, 1885. This volume Field had picked up in some secondhand book-store for a quarter or a dime. He had erased the pencilled name of the original owner on the fly-leaf and had written mine and the date over it in ink. Then turning to the inside of the back cover he had rubbed out the price mark and ostentatiously scrawled "$2.50." This "doctoring" of price marks was a favorite practice of Field's, perfectly understood among his friends as a token of affectionate humor and never dreamed of as an attempt at deception. By such means he added zest to the exchange of those mementoes of friendship, which were never forgotten as Christmas-tide rolled round, to the end of the chapter. The day has indeed come when it is "a pleasure to remember these things."