Field’s area of education embraced New England, Missouri, and what European territory he could cover in six months. At twenty-three he became a reporter on the St. Louis _Evening Journal_, the rest of his life being given, with a dogged devotion, to journalism. Driven by the demands of his unique daily columns (those on the Denver _Tribune_ [1881–1883] and the Chicago _Daily News_ [1883–1895] were widely copied), Field first capitalized and then standardized his high spirits, his erudition, his whimsicality, his fondness for children. He wrote so often with his tongue in his cheek that it is difficult to say where true sentiment stops and an exaggerated sentimentality begins. “Field,” says Fred Lewis Pattee, in his detailed study of _American Literature Since 1870_, “more than any other writer of the period, illustrates the way the old type of literary scholar was to be modified and changed by the newspaper. Every scrap of Field’s voluminous product was written for immediate newspaper consumption. He patronized not at all the literary magazines, he wrote his books not at all with book intent—he made them up from newspaper fragments.... He was a pioneer in a peculiar province: he stands for the journalization of literature, a process that, if carried to its logical extreme, will make of the man of letters a mere newspaper reporter.” Though Field still may be overrated in some quarters, there is little doubt that certain of his child lyrics, his homely philosophic ballads (in the vein which Harte and Riley popularized) and his brilliant burlesques will occupy a niche in American letters. Readers of all tastes will find much to surprise and delight them in _A Little Book of Western Verse_ (1889), _With Trumpet and Drum_ (1892), _A Second Book of Verse_ (1893) and those remarkable versions (and perversions) of Horace, _Echoes from the Sabine Farm_ (1893) written in collaboration with his equally adroit brother, Roswell M. Field. A complete one-volume edition of his verse was issued in 1910. Field died in Chicago, Illinois, November 4, 1895. OUR TWO OPINIONS[9] Us two wuz boys when we fell out,— Nigh to the age uv my youngest now; Don’t rec’lect what ’twuz about, Some small deeff’rence, I’ll allow. Lived next neighbors twenty years, A-hatin’ each other, me ’nd Jim,— He having _his_ opinyin uv _me_, ’Nd _I_ havin’ _my_ opinyin uv _him_.