Read Ebook: McClure's Magazine Vol. 1 No. 3 August 1893 by Various

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McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. I AUGUST, 1893 No. 3

Table of Contents

PAGE The Old Homestead at Fayetteville, Vermont. 196 Eugene Field's Home at Buena Park, Chicago. 197 The Hall. 198 A Bit of Library. 199 The Dining-Room. 199 The Drawing-Room. 201 Field's "Treasures." 203 Hairy Hudson. 206 Captain Johnson and Mr. Wharton. 207 The Action. 209 Aboard the "Leda." 210 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 214 J. J. Ingalls. 216 Jules Verne. 218 Karl Hagenbeck's Father and His First Show in Berlin. 220 The Scramble in Munich. 223 The Old and New Castle of Hawarden. 236 Miss Glynne , 1838. 237 The Orphanage, Hawarden. 237 The Inmates of Woodsford Hall in the Forest. 239 The Annual Lunch Party of the Notting Hill School Girls. 240 Mrs. Gladstone To-day. 241 The Chapel. 243 The Camp on March. 249 A Halt for Supper. 250 The Barge. 250 Captain Cairn's House. 253 The Death Mask of Edwin Booth. 267 "I Ain't No Missionary!" 269 "Excellent Claret," Said Harry. 271 "No Violence, Jim!" 272 "What Is Your Annual Income as a Burglar?" 273

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN EUGENE FIELD AND HAMLIN GARLAND.

RECORDED BY HAMLIN GARLAND.

One afternoon quite recently two men sat in an attic study in one of the most interesting homes in the city of Chicago. A home that was a museum of old books, rare books, Indian relics, dramatic souvenirs and bric-a-brac indescribable, but each piece with a history.

It was a beautiful June day, and the study window looked out upon a lawn of large trees where children were rioting. It was a part of Chicago which the traveler never sees, green and restful and dignified, the lake not far off.

The host was a tall, thin-haired man with a New England face of the Scotch type, rugged, smoothly shaven, and generally very solemn--suspiciously solemn in expression. His infrequent smile curled his wide, expressive mouth in fantastic grimaces which seemed not to affect the steady gravity of the blue-gray eyes. He was stripped to his shirt-sleeves and sat with feet on a small stand. He chewed reflectively upon a cigar during the opening of the talk. His voice was deep but rather dry in quality.

The other man was a rather heavily built man with brown hair and beard cut rather close. He listened, mainly, going off into gusts of laughter occasionally as the other man gave a quaint turn to some very frank phrase. The tall host was Eugene Field, the interviewer a Western writer by the name of Garland.

"Well now, brother Field," said Garland, interrupting his host as he was about to open another case of rare books. "You remember I'm to interview you to-day."

Field scowled savagely.

"O say, Garland, can't we put that thing off?"

"No. Must be did," replied his friend decisively. "Now there are two ways to do this thing. We can be as literary and as deliciously select in our dialogue as Mr. Howells and Professor Boyesen were, or we can be wild and woolly. How would it do to be as wild and woolly as those Eastern fellers expect us to be?"

"All right," said Field, taking his seat well upon the small of his back. "What does it all mean anyway? What you goin' to do?"

"I'm goin' to take notes while we talk, and I'm goin' to put this thing down pretty close to the fact, now, you bet," said Garland, sharpening a pencil.

"Where you wan'to begin?"

"Oh, we'll have to begin with your ancestry, though it's a good deal like the introductory chapter to the old-fashioned novels. We'll start early, with your birth for instance."

"Well, I was born in St. Louis."

"Is that so?" the interviewer showed an unprofessional surprise. "Why, I thought you were born in Massachusetts?"

"No," said Field, reflectively. "No, I'm sorry of course, but I was born in St. Louis; but my parents were Vermont people." He mentioned this as an extenuating circumstance, evidently. "My father was a lawyer. He was a precocious boy,--graduated from Middlebury College when he was fifteen, and when he was nineteen was made States-Attorney by special act of the legislature; without that he would have had to wait till he was twenty-one. He married and came West, and I was born in 1850."

"So you're forty-three? Where does the New England life come in?"

"When I was seven years old my mother died, and father packed us boys right off to Massachusetts and put us under the care of a maiden cousin, a Miss French,--she was a fine woman too."

Garland looked up from his scratchpad to ask, "This was at Amherst?"

He sat a moment in silence, and his face softened and his eyes grew tender. "I tell you, Garland, a man's got to have a layer of country experience somewhere in him. My love for nature dates from that visit, because I had never lived in the country before. Sooner or later a man rots if he lives too far away from the grass and the trees."

"You're right there, Field, only I didn't know you felt it so deeply. I supposed you hated farm life."

"I do, but farm life is not nature. I'd like to live in the country without the effects of work and dirt and flies."

The word "flies" started him off on a side-track. "Say! You should see my boys. I go up to a farm near Fox Lake and stay a week every year, suffering all sorts of tortures, in order to give my boys a chance to see farm life. I sit there nights trying to read by a vile-smelling old kerosene lamp, the flies trooping in so that you can't keep the window down, you know, and those boys lying there all the time on a hot husk bed, faces spattered with mosquito bites and sweating like pigs--and happy as angels. The roar of the flies and mosquitoes is sweetest lullaby to a tired boy."

"Well, now, going back to that visit," said the interviewer with persistency to his plan.

"Oh, yes. Well, my grandmother was a regular old New England Congregationalist. Say, I've got a sermon I wrote when I was nine. The old lady used to give me ten cents for every sermon I'd write. Like to see it?"

"Well, I should say. A sermon at nine years! Field, you started in well."

"Didn't I?" he replied, while getting the book. "And you bet it's a corker." He produced the volume, which was a small bundle of note-paper bound beautifully. It was written in a boy's formal hand. He sat down to read it:

"I would remark secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of Guilt his conscience smites him. The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to the beholder. Some times, however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A death in a family of some favorite object or be attacked by Some disease himself is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a little time perhaps he is stayed in his wickedness, but before long he returns to his worldly lust. Oh, it is indeed bad for sinners to go down into perdition over all the obstacles which God has placed in his path. But many I am afraid do go down into perdition, for wide gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction and many there be that go in thereat."

He stopped occasionally to look at Garland gravely, as he read some particularly comical phrase: "'I secondly remark'--ain't that great?--'that the wise man remembers even how near he is to the portals of death.' 'Portals of death' is good. 'One should strive to walk the narrow way and not the one which leads to perdition.' I was heavy on quotations, you notice."

"Is this the first and last of your sermons?" queried Garland, with an amused smile.

"The first and last. Grandmother soon gave me up as bad material for a preacher. She paid me five dollars for learning the Ten Commandments. I used to be very slow at 'committing to memory.' I recall that while I was thus committing the book of Acts, my brother committed that book and the Gospel of Matthew, part of John, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians and the Westminster Catechism. I would not now exchange for any amount of money the acquaintance with the Bible that was drummed into me when I was a boy. At learning 'pieces to speak' I was, however, unusually quick, and my favorites were: 'Marco Bozzaris,' 'Psalm of Life,' Drake's 'American Flag,' Longfellow's 'Launching of the Ship,' Webster's 'Action,' Shakspeare's 'Clarence's Dream' , and 'Wolsey to Cromwell,' 'Death of Virginia,' 'Horatius at the Bridge,' 'Hymn of the Moravian Nuns,' 'Absalom,' 'Lochiel's Warning,' 'Maclean's Revenge,' Bulwer's translation of Schiller's 'The Diver,' 'Landing of the Pilgrims,' Bryant's 'Melancholy Days,' 'Burial of Sir John Moore,' and 'Hohenlinden.'"

"I remember when I was thirteen, our cousin said she'd give us a Christmas tree. So we went down into Patrick's swamp--I suppose the names are all changed now--and dug up a little pine tree, about as tall as we were, and planted it in a tub. On the night of Christmas Day, just when we were dancing around the tree, making merry and having a high-old-jinks of a time, the way children will, grandma came in and looked at us. 'Will this popery never cease?' was all she said, and out she flounced."

"Now hold on," he interrupted. "I want to finish. We planted that tree near the corner of Sunset Avenue and Amity Street, and it's there now, a magnificent tree. Sometime when I'm East I'm going to go up there with my brother and put a tablet on it--'Pause, busy traveller, and give a thought to the happy days of two Western boys who lived in old New England, and make resolve to render the boyhood near you happier and brighter,' or something like that."

"That's a pretty idea," Garland agreed. He felt something fine and tender in the man's voice which was generally hard and dry but wonderfully expressive.

"Now, this sermon I had bound just for the sake of old times. If I didn't have it right here, I wouldn't believe I ever wrote such stuff. I tell you, a boy's a queer combination," he ended, referring to the book again.

"You'll see that I signed my name, those days, 'E. P. Field.' The 'P.' stands for Phillips.

"As I grew old enough to realize it, I was much chagrined to find I had no middle name like the rest of the boys, so I took the name of Phillips. I was a great admirer of Wendell Phillips, am yet, though I'm not a reformer. You'll see here,"--he pointed at the top of the pages,--"I wrote the word 'sensual.' Evidently I was struck with the word, and was seeking a chance to ring it in somewhere, but failed." They both laughed over the matter while Field put the book back.

"Are you a college man?" asked Garland. "I've noticed your deplorable tendency toward the classics."

"I fitted for college when I was sixteen. My health was bad, or I should have entered right off. I had pretty nearly everything that was going in the way of diseases," this was said with a comical twist voice, "so I didn't get to Williams till I was eighteen. My health improved right along, but I'm sorry to say that of the college did not." He smiled again, a smile that meant a very great deal.

"What happened then?"

"Well, my father died, and I returned West. I went to live with my guardian, Professor Burgess, of Knox College. This college is situated at Galesburg, Illinois. This is the college that has lately conferred A. M. upon me. The Professor's guardianship was merely nominal, however. I did about as I pleased.

"I next went to the State University at Columbia, Missouri. It was an old slave-holding town, but I liked it. I've got a streak of Southern feeling in me." He said abruptly, "I'm an aristocrat. I'm looking for a Maecenas. I have mighty little in common with most of the wealthy, but I like the idea of wealth in the abstract." He failed to make the distinction quite clear, but he went on as if realizing that this might be a thin spot of ice.

"At twenty-one, I came into sixty thousand dollars, and I went to Europe, taking a friend, a young fellow of about my own age, with me. I had a lovely time!" he added, and again the smile conveyed vast meaning.

Garland looked up from his pad.

"You must have had. Did you 'blow in the whole business'?"

"Came home when the money gave out, I reckon?"

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