CHAPTER XI COMING TO CHICAGO What I have written thus far of Eugene Field has been based upon what the lawyers call hearsay or documentary evidence. It has for the most part been directly heard or confirmed from his own lips. In the early days of our acquaintance the stories of his life in Denver were rife through every newspaper office and green-room in the United States. No one who had spent any time in Colorado came East without bringing a fresh budget of tales of the pranks and pasquinades of Eugene Field, of the Denver Tribune. The clipping vogue of his Primer series had given him a newspaper reputation wide as the continent. He was far more quoted, however, for what he said and did than for anything he wrote. Had his career ended in 1883, before he came to Chicago, there would have been little or nothing left of literary value to keep his memory alive, beyond the regretful mention in the obituary columns of the western press. And it came near ending, like the candle exposed to the gusts of March, or a bubble that has danced and glistened its brief moment in the sun. The boy who was too delicate for continued application to books in Amherst, who had outgrown his strength so that his entrance at Williams was postponed a year, whose backwardness at his books through three colleges had been excused on the plea of ill-health, had been living a pace too fast for a never strong and always rebellious stomach. He was not intemperate in eating or drinking. It was not excess in the first that ruined his digestion, nor intemperance in the other that caused him to become a total abstainer from all kinds of intoxicating beverages. He simply became a dyspeptic through a weird devotion to the pieces and pastries "like Mary French used to make," and he became a teetotaler because the doctors mistook the cause of his digestive distress. The one thing of which Eugene Field was intemperate in Denver was of himself. He gave to that delicate machinery we call the body no rest. It was winter when he did not see the sun rise several times a week, and the hours he stole from daylight for sleep were too few and infrequent to make up for the nights he turned into day for work and frolic. Thus it came about that in the summer of 1883 Eugene Field had reached the end of his physical tether, and some change of scene was necessary to save what was left of an impaired constitution. From what has been said, it is easy to understand how Field's abilities were diverted into a new and deeper channel in 1883. "Stricken by dyspepsia," writes Mr. Cowen, "so severely that he fell into a state of chronic depression and alarm, he eagerly accepted the timely offer of Melville E. Stone, then surrounding himself with the best talent he could procure in the West, of a virtually independent desk on the Chicago Morning News. There he quickly regained health, although he never recovered from his ailment."