There were two Fields--the author and the man--and it is the purpose of this study to reproduce the latter as he appeared to those who knew and loved him for what he was personally for the benefit of those who have only known him through the medium of his writings. In doing this it is far from my intention and farther from my friendship to disturb any of the preconceptions that have been formed from the perusal of his works. These are the creations of something entirely apart from the man whose genius produced them. His fame as an author rests on his printed books, and will endure as surely as the basis of his art was true, his methods severely simple, and his spirit gentle and pure. In his daily work the dominant note was that of fun and conviviality. It was free from the acrimony of controversy. He abominated speech-makers and lampooned political oracles. He was the unsparing satirist of contemporary pretense, which in itself was sufficient to account for the failure of the passing generation of literary critics to accord to him the recognition which he finally won in their despite from the reading public. Neither a sinner nor a saint was the man who went into an old book-store in Chicago and bewildered the matter-of-fact dealer in old editions with the inquiry, "Have you an unexpurgated copy of Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?" Everything Field wrote in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life--those minor sympathies that are common to all and finally swell into the major song of life--of this sense he was compact. It was the meat and marrow of his life and mind, of his song and story. With unerring instinct Field, in his study of humanity, went to the one school where the emotions, wishes, and passions of mankind are to be seen unobscured by the veil of consciousness. He was forever scanning whatever lies hidden within the folds of the heart of childhood. He knew children through and through because he studied them from themselves and not from books. He associated with them on terms of the most intimate comradeship and wormed his way into their confidence with assiduous sympathy. Thus he became possessed of the inmost secrets of their childish joys and griefs and so became a literary philosopher of childhood.