Of course this was received with a chorus of incredulity--as it was intended it should be. The autograph hunters who had formed their conception of Field from his lullabies, his "Little Boy Blue," his "Krinken," his "Wynken," and his score of other poems, all proving his mastery over the strings that vibrate with the rocking of the cradle, at once pronounced this the most delicious hit of their author's humor. They knew that such songs could only emanate from a man whose heart overflowed with the warmest sentiment to all childhood. They were convinced that Field must love all children, and nothing he could say could change their conviction. [Illustration: FIELD THE COMEDIAN.] And yet those words, "I do not love all children," are the truest six words in his "Auto-Analysis." Field not only did not love all children, he truly loved very few children. His own children were very dear to him, both those that came in his early wedded life and the two who were born to him after his return from Europe. They were a never-failing source of interest and enjoyment to him. They were the human documents he loved best to study. They wore no masks to conceal their emotions, and he hated masks--on others. But above all, they were bone of his bone and flesh of his love, the pledges and hostages he had given to fortune, and they were the children of her to whom he had vowed eternal faith "when their two lives were young." But Field's fondness for other people's children was like that of an entomologist for bugs--for purposes of study, dissection, and classification. He delighted to see the varying shades of emotion chase each other across their little tell-tale faces. This man, who could not have set his foot on a worm, who shrank from the sight of pain inflicted on any dumb animal, took almost as much delight in making a child cry, that he might study its little face in dismay or fright, as in making it laugh, that he might observe its method of manifesting pleasure. He read the construction of child-nature in the unreserved expressions of childish emotions as he provoked or evoked them. Thus he grew to know children as few have known them, and his exceptional gift of writing for and about them was the result of deliberate study rather than of personal sympathy. That his own children were sometimes a trial to their "devoted mother" and "fond father," as he described their parents, may be inferred from the facts which were the basis of such bits of confidence between Field and the readers of his "Sharps and Flats" as this: