When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appetites and a digestion the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny" (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, buttoned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke. Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect: "The Lord will provide, my father can't!"