The Holy Cross and Other Tales

The Holy Cross and Other Tales,
by Eugene

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Eugene Field, Illustrated by S. W. Van Schaik
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Title: The Holy Cross and Other Tales
Author: Eugene Field

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The Works of Eugene Field
Vol. V
The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field
THE HOLY CROSS AND OTHER TALES

[Frontispiece: "Presently the whole company was moved by a gentle
pity." Drawn by S. W. Van Schaik.]

Charles Scribner's Sons New York 1911
Copyright, 1893, by Eugene Field.
Copyright, 1896, by Julia Sutherland Field.

DEDICATED WITH LOVE
AND GRATITUDE TO
ROSWELL MARTIN FIELD

NOTE.
To this volume as it was originally issued have been added five Tales,
beginning with "The Platonic Bassoon," which are characteristic of the
various moods, serious, gay, or pathetic, out of which grew the best

work of the author's later years.

INTRODUCTION
ALAS, POOR YORICK!
In paying a tribute to the mingled mirth and tenderness of Eugene
Field--the poet of whose going the West may say, "He took our
daylight with him"--one of his fellow journalists has written that he was
a jester, but not of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was
not only,--so the writer implied,--the maker of jibes and fantastic
devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical
conceits; he was the laureate of children--dear for his "Wynken,
Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover,
withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with
delight a quaint archaic English of his special devising; who collected
rare books, and brought out his own "Little Books" of "Western Verse"
and "Profitable Tales" in high-priced limited editions, with broad
margins of paper that moths and rust do not corrupt, but which tempts
bibliomaniacs to break through and steal.
For my own part, I would select Yorick as the very forecast, in
imaginative literature, of our various Eugene. Surely Shakespeare
conceived the "mad rogue" of Elsinore as made up of grave and gay, of
wit and gentleness, and not as a mere clown or "jig maker." It is true
that when Field put on his cap and bells, he too was "wont to set the
table on a roar," as the feasters at a hundred tables, from "Casey's Table
d'Hôte" to the banquets of the opulent East, now rise to testify. But
Shakespeare plainly reveals, concerning Yorick, that mirth was not his
sole attribute,--that his motley covered the sweetest nature and the
tenderest heart. It could be no otherwise with one who loved and
comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does
Hamlet say?--"He hath borne me upon his back a thousand times . . .
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft!" Of what is
he thinking but of his boyhood, before doubts and contemplation
wrapped him in the shadow, and when in his young grief or frolic the

gentle Yorick, with his jest, his "excellent fancy," and his songs and
gambols, was his comrade?
Of all moderns, then, here or in the old world, Eugene Field seems to
be most like the survival, or revival, of the ideal jester of knightly times;
as if Yorick himself were incarnated, or as if a superior bearer of the
bauble at the court of Italy, or of France, or of English King Hal, had
come to life again--as much out of time as Twain's Yankee at the Court
of Arthur; but not out of place,--for he fitted himself as aptly to his folk
and region as Puck to the fays and mortals of a wood near Athens. In
the days of divine sovereignty, the jester, we see, was by all odds the
wise man of the palace; the real fools were those he made his butt--the
foppish pages, the obsequious courtiers, the swaggering guardsmen, the
insolent nobles, and not seldom majesty itself. And thus it is that
painters and romancers have loved to draw him. Who would not rather
be Yorick than Osric, or Touchstone than Le Beau, or even poor
Bertuccio than one of his brutal mockers? Was not the redoubtable
Chicot, with his sword and brains,