"Very, very many years ago, we read and cried over a little book written by Grace Greenwood and entitled 'The History of My Pets.' Even as a child we wondered why it was that evil invariably befell the pets of youth. "We all know that most little folks are tender-hearted, yet there are some who seem indifferent to pets, to have little sympathy with the pathos of dumb animals. And we have so often wondered whether after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say less of pain out of life than the others. The tender heart seldom hardens; in maturer years its comprehensions and sympathies broaden, and this of course involves pain. Are the delights of sympathy a fair offset to the pains thereof?" The boy at Amherst was the father of the man at forty-two. It was to the prototype of "The Bench-Legged Fyce," known in Miss French's household as "Dooley," that the boy Eugene attributed his first verse, a parody on the well-known lines, "Oh, had I the wings of a dove!" Dooley's song ran: _Oh, had I wings like a dove I would fly Away from this world of fleas; I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard And light on Miss Emerson's trees._ It was rank disloyalty to the memory of "Dooley" to rename the bench-legged fyce "Sooner" and locate the scene of his "chronic repose" in St. Jo rather than under the flea-proof tree of Mrs. Emerson in Amherst. But who regrets the poetic license as he reads: _We all hev our choice, an' you like the rest, Allow that dorg which you've got is the best; I wouldn't give much for the boy 'at grows up With no friendship subsistin' 'tween him and a pup; When a fellow gits old--I tell you it's nice To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce!_ Although Eugene Field never forgot or forgave the terrors of the New England Sabbath, its strict observance, its bad singing, doleful prayers and interminable sermons, the impress of those all-day sessions in church and Sunday-school was never eradicated from his life and writings. Nothing else influenced his work or affected his style as much as the morals and the literature of the Bible and the sacred songs that were lined out week after week from the pulpit under which he literally and figuratively sat when a youth. "If," he has said, "I could be grateful to New England for nothing else I should bless her forevermore for pounding me with the Bible and the Spelling-Book."