And now I come to that event in the life of Eugene Field which has naturally attracted the widest interest among all who have delighted in his written tributes to womankind and mother love. In his memorial to Mrs. Gray, Field has given expression to his special reverence for the love between parent and child. "For my dear mother," he wrote, "went from me so many years ago that when I come to speak of the blessedness of a mother's love, I hardly know whereof I speak, it is all so far, so very far away, and withal so precious, so sacred a thing." This note recurs constantly through his writings, and it is not to be wondered at that the love of a man for a woman should have come early to a youth whose heart had always felt the yearning for something more tender and personal than the utmost kindness of those upon whose affections others had equal or greater claims. Through his boyhood and school days, Field's affection for the petticoated sex had been tempered by an irresistible impulse to tease all the daughters of Eve. It is doubtful if his affections were ever more seriously engaged by the girls of Amherst or the young ladies of Williams and Knox than was his attention by the regular studies of school or college. He came to both in his own way and time; with the difference that when he once felt the touch of the inevitable maiden's hand in his, he responded with an immediate ardor far different from the slow and eccentric manner in which he wooed the love of scholarship and letters. It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European trip and experiences. Now Edgar's parents lived at St. Joseph, and with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still in short dresses. What more natural than that Edgar's elder sisters should visit him during his college term and there meet and be attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag in Columbia? Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo. Besides, what interest would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?