He [Field's father] made the perusal of the Greek and Latin classics his most delightful pastime. In fact, he resorted to this scientific research, particularly in the department of mathematics, for his chief mental recreation. It is greatly to be regretted that he neglected to combine, with his cessation from professional labor, some employment which would have revived and strengthened his physical frame. He was averse to active exercise, and for some years before his death he lived a life of studious seclusion which would have been philosophical had he not violated, in the little care he took of his health, one of the most important lessons which philosophy teaches. At a comparatively early age he died of physical exhaustion, a deterioration of the bodily organs, and an incapacity, on their part, to discharge the vital functions--a wearing out of the machine before the end of the term for which its duration was designed. He was eminently qualified to serve, as well as to adorn, society, and in all likelihood he would have found in a greater variety of occupation some relief from the monotonous strain under which his energies prematurely gave way. But the conditions that confronted Eugene Field at the age of forty-one were very different from those under which his father succumbed prematurely at sixty-one. He had made a name and fame for himself, but had not stored any of the harvest his writings were beginning to yield. He could write, as he did, that he expected to do his best literary work when a grandfather, but he had no belief that he would live to enjoy that happy Indian summer of paternity. He was tired of being moved from rented flat to rented house with his accumulated belongings, and he yearned with the "sot" New England yearning for a permanent home, a roof-tree that he could call his own, a patch of earth in which he could "slosh around," with no landlord to importune for grudging repairs.