Songs and Other Verse | Page 3

dangerous illness. It is so seldom that I pray that when I do God knows I am in earnest. I do not pester Him with small matters. It is only when I am in real want that I get down on my wicked knees and pray. And I prayed for you last night, dear friend, for your friendship--the help that it is to me--is what I need, and I cannot be bereft of it. God has always been good to me, and He has said yes to my prayer, I am sure. Others, too--thousands of them--are praying for you, and for your restoration to health; none other has had in it more love and loyalty than my prayer had, and none other, dear friend, among the thousands whom you have blessed with your sweet friendship, loves you better than I do.
EUGENE FIELD.?BUENA PARK, NOVEMBER 15, 1893.
I am still sick abed and I find it hard to think out and write a letter. Read between the lines and the love there will comfort you more than my faulty words can.
I have often thought, as I saw him through his later years espousing the noblest causes with true-hearted zeal, of what he once said in the old "Saints' and Sinners' Corner" when a conversation sprang up on the death of Professor David Swing. His words go far to explain to me that somewhat reckless humor which oftentimes made it seem that he loved to imitate and hold in the pillory of his own inimitable powers of mimicry some of the least attractive forms of the genus _parson_ he had seen and known. He said: "A good many things I do and say are things I have to employ to keep down the intention of those who wanted me to be a parson. I guess their desire got into my blood, too, for I have always to preach some little verses or I cannot get through Christmastide."
He had to get on with blood which was exquisitely harmonious with the heart of the Christ. He was not only a born member of the Society for the Prevention of Sorrow to Mankind, but he was by nature a champion of a working Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This society was composed of himself. He wished to enlarge the membership of this latter association, but nobody was as orthodox in the faith as to the nobility of a balky horse, and he found none as intolerant of ill-treatment toward any and every brute, as was he. Professor Swing had written and read at the Parliament of Religions an essay on the Humane Treatment of the Brutes, which became a classic before the ink was dry, and one day Field proposed to him and another clergyman that they begin a practical crusade. On those cold days, drivers were demanding impossible things of smooth-shod horses on icy streets, and he saw many a noble beast on his knees, "begging me," as he said, "to get him a priest." Field's scheme was that the delicate and intelligent seer, David Swing, and his less refined and less gentle contemporary should go with him to the City Hall and be sworn in as special policemen and "do up these fellows." His clear blue eye was like a palpitating morning sky, and his whole thin and tall frame shook with passionate missionary zeal. "Ah," said he, as the beloved knight of the unorthodox explained that if he undertook the proposed task he would surely have to abandon all other work, "I never was satisfied that you were orthodox." His other friend had already fallen in his estimate as to fitness for such work. For, had not Eugene Field once started out to pay a bill of fifteen dollars, and had he not met a semblance of a man on the street who was beating a lengthily under-jawed and bad-eyed bull-dog of his own, for some misdemeanor? "Yea, verily," confessed the poet-humorist, who was then a reformer. "Why didn't you have him arrested, Eugene?" "Why, well, I was going jingling along with some new verses in my heart, and I knew I'd lose the _tempo_ if I became militant. I said, 'What'll you take for him?' The pup was so homely that his face ached, but, as I was in a hurry to get to work, I gave him the fifteen dollars, and took the beast to the office." For a solitary remark uttered at the conclusion of this relation and fully confirmed as to its justness by an observation of the dog, his only other human prop for this enterprise was discarded. "Oh, you won't do," he said.
Christianity was increasingly dear to him as the discovery of childhood and the unfolding of its revelations. Into what long disquisitions he