Eugene Field, a Study in Heredity and Contradictions Volume I Part 10

In the early summer of 1883 Mr. Stone, who had been watching with appreciative newspaper sense the popularity of the Tribune Primer skits, cast an acquisitive net in the direction of Denver. He had known Field in St. Louis, and describes their first meeting thus: "I entered the office of the Dispatch to see Stillson Hutchins, the then proprietor of that paper. It was in the forenoon, the busy hour for an afternoon newspaper. A number of people were there, but as to the proprietor, clerks, and customers, none was engaged in any business, for, perched on the front counter, telling in a strangely resonant voice a very funny story, sat Eugene Field. He was a striking figure, tall, gaunt, almost bald (though little more than twenty years of age), smooth shaven, and with a remarkable face, which lent itself to every variety of emotion. In five minutes after our introduction I knew him. There was no reserve about him. He was of the free, whole-souled western type-that type which invites your confidence in return for absolute and unstinted frankness."

Instead of broaching his purpose by letter, Mr. Stone slipped off to Denver for a personal interview with his intended victim, and, as I have already intimated, he arrived just in the nick of time to find Field ready for any move that would take him away from the killing kindness and exhilarating atmosphere of the Colorado capital. "The engagement," says Mr. Stone, "was in itself characteristic. Field wanted to join me. He was tired of Denver and mistrustful of the limitations upon him there. But if he was to make a change, he must be a.s.sured that it was to be for his permanent good. He was a newspaper man not from choice, but because in that field he could earn his daily bread. Behind all he was conscious of great capability-not vain or by any means self-sufficient, but certain that by study and endeavor he could take high rank in the literary world and could win a place of lasting distinction. So he stipulated that he should be given a column of his own, that he might stand or fall by the excellence of his own work. Salary was less an object than opportunity."

Mr. Stone gave the necessary a.s.surances, both as to salary-by no means princely-and opportunity as large as Field had the genius to fill. As quickly as he could, Field closed up his Denver connections and prepared for the last move in his newspaper life. How he survived the round of farewell luncheons, dinners, and midnight suppers given for and by him was a source of mingled pride and amus.e.m.e.nt to the chief sufferer. It was with feelings of genuine regret that he turned his back on Denver and gave up the jovial and congenial a.s.sociation with the Tribune and its staff. Although its chief editorial writer, O.H. Rothacker, had a national reputation, Field was the star of the company that gave to the Tribune its unique reputation among the journals of the West, and all cla.s.ses of citizens felt that something picturesquely characteristic of the liberty and good-fellows.h.i.+p of their bustling town was being taken from them. Field's departure meant the closing of the hobble-de-hoy period in the life of Denver as well as in his own. His life there had been exactly suited to his temperament, to the times, and to the environment. It is doubtful if it would have been possible to repeat such an experience in Denver five years later, and it is certain that in five years Field had developed whole leagues of character beyond its repet.i.tion.

It was in August, 1883, that Eugene Field, with his family and all his personal effects, except his father's library, moved to Chicago. That library was destined to remain safely stored in St. Louis for many years before he felt financially able to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of a.s.sociations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human pa.s.sions and emotions at first hand and getting very little a.s.sistance through pouring over the printed observations of others. He was not a cla.s.sical scholar in the sense of having acquired any mastery of or familiarity with the great Latin or Greek writers. Language, all languages, was a study that was easy to him, and he acquired facility in translating any foreign tongue, living or dead, with remarkable readiness by the aid of a dictionary and a nimble wit. Student in St. Louis, Kansas City, or Denver he was not, any more than at Williams, Galesburg, or Columbia. But I have no doubt that when Eugene Field left Denver he had a fixed intention, as suggested in the words of Mr. Stone, by study and endeavor to take high rank in the literary world and to "win a place of lasting distinction."

When he came to Chicago his family consisted of Mrs. Field and their four children, all, happily for him, in vigorous health, and, so far as the children were concerned, endowed with appet.i.tes and a digestion the envy and despair of their father. "Trotty," the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny" (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his mother's boy, a large-eyed, st.u.r.dy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance to astonish the natives of North Chicago. It occurred to him one bleak day in December that it was time the people knew there was a stranger in town. So he arrayed himself in a long linen duster, b.u.t.toned up from knees to collar, put an old straw hat on his head, and taking a shabby book under one arm and a palm-leaf fan in his hand, he marched all the way down Clark Street, past the City Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the pa.s.sers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished faces, he mounted the two flights of stairs to the editorial rooms, where he recounted, with the glee of the boy he was in such things, the success of his joke.

Trotty was his favorite child, probably because she was the only girl, and he was very fond of little girls. Even then she favored her father in complexion and features more than any of the boys, having the same large innocent-looking blue eyes. But even she had to serve his disposition to extract humor from every situation. Before Field had been in Chicago two months he realized that he had made a serious miscalculation in impressing Mr. Stone with the thought that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three l.u.s.ty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in Sunday-school, he schooled her to rise and declaim with great effect:

"The Lord will provide, my father can't!"

The means Field took to bring the insufficiency of his salary to the attention of Mr. Stone were as ingenious as they were frequent. I don't think he would have appreciated an increase of salary that came without some exercise of his wayward fancy for making mirth out of any embarra.s.sing financial condition.

It is more than probable that Eugene Field chose Chicago for the place of his permanent abode after deliberately weighing the advantages and limitations of its situation with reference to his literary career. He felt that it was as far east as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine American flavor out of our literature. He had received many tempting offers from New York newspapers before coming to Chicago, and after our acquaintance I do not believe a year went by that Field did not decline an engagement, personally tendered by Mr. Dana, to go to the New York Sun, at a salary nearly double that he was receiving here. But, as he told Julian Ralph on one occasion, he would not live in, or write for, the East. For, as he put it, there was more liberty and fewer literary "fellers" out West, and a man had more chance to be judged on his merits and "grow up with the country."

The Chicago to which Eugene Field came in 1883 was a city of something over six hundred thousand inhabitants, and pulsing with active political and commercial life. It had been rebuilt, physically, after the fire with money borrowed from the East, and was almost too busy paying interest and princ.i.p.al to have much time to read books, much less make them, except in the wholly manufacturing sense. It had already become a great publis.h.i.+ng centre, but not of the books that engage the critical intelligence of the public. The feverish devotion of its citizens to business during the day-time drove them to bed at an unseasonably early hour, or to places of amus.e.m.e.nt, from which they went so straight home after the performances that there was not a single fas.h.i.+onable restaurant in the city catering to supper parties after the play. Whether this condition, making theatre-going less expensive here than in other large cities, conduced to the result or not, it was a fact that in the early eighties Chicago was the best paying city on the continent for theatrical companies of all degrees of merit. The losses which the best artists and plays almost invariably reported of New York engagements were frequently recouped in Chicago.

Chicago never took kindly to grand opera, and probably for the same reason that it patronized the drama. It sought entertainment and amus.e.m.e.nt, and grand opera is a serious business. As Field said of himself, Chicago liked music "limited"; and its liking was generally limited to light or comic opera and the entertainments of the Apollo Club, until Theodore Thomas, with admirable perseverance, aided by the pocket-books of public-spirited citizens rather than by enthusiastic music-lovers, succeeded in cultivating the study and love of music up to a standard above that of any other American city, with the possible exception of Boston.

I have referred to the theatrical and musical conditions in Chicago in 1883, because it was in them that Eugene Field found his most congenial atmosphere and a.s.sociations when he came hither that year. These were the chief reminders of the life he had left behind when he turned his back on Denver, and I need scarcely say that they continued to afford him the keenest pleasure and the most unalloyed recreation to the end.

Architecturally, Chicago was no more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skysc.r.a.per stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by hand, and the joke was current that a Chicagoan of those days could never hear a bell ring without starting on a run to avoid being bridged. The cable-car was an experiment on one line, and all the other street-cars were operated with horses and stopped operation at 12.20 A.M., as Field often learned to his infinite disgust, for he hated walking worse than he did horses or horse-cars. In many ways Chicago reminded Field of Denver, and in no respect more than in its primitive ways, its a.s.sumed airs of importance, and its towns.h.i.+p politics. Despite its forty odd years of incorporated life, Chicago, the third city of the United States, was still a village, and Field insisted on regarding it as such.

Transplanted from the higher alt.i.tude at the foot of the Rockies to the level of Lake Michigan, I think nothing about Chicago struck him more forcibly than the harshness of its variable summer climate. Scarcely a week went by that his column did not contain some reference in paragraph or verse to its fickle alarming changes. He had not enough warm blood back of that large gray face to rejoice when the mercury dropped in an hour, as it often did, from 88 or 90 degrees to 56 or 60 degrees. Such changes, which came with the whirl of the weather vane, as the wind s.h.i.+fted from its long sweep over the prairies, all aquiver with the heat, to a strong blow over hundreds of miles of water whose temperature in dog days never rose above 60 degrees, provoked from him verses such as these, written in the respective months they celebrate in the year 1884:

CHICAGO IN JULY The white-capp'd waves of Michigan break On the beach where the jacksnipes croon- The breeze sweeps in from the purple lake And tempers the heat of noon: In yonder bush, where the berries grow, The Peewee tunefully sings, While hither and thither the people go, Attending to matters and things.

There is cool for all in the busy town- For the girls in their sealskin sacques- For the dainty dudes idling up and down, With overcoats on their backs; And the horse-cars lurch and the people run And the bell at the bridgeway rings- But never perspires a single one, Attending to matters and things.

What though the s.h.i.+vering mercury wanes- What though the air be chill?

The beauteous Chloe never complains As she roams by the purpling rill; And the torn-t.i.t coos to its gentle mate, As Chloe industriously swings With Daphnis, her beau, on the old front gate, Attending to matters and things.

When the moon comes up, and her cold, pale light Coquettes with the freezing streams, What care these twain for the wintry night, Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams, And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe O'er his fair jack full on kings, But smiles that fortune should bless him so, Attending to matters and things.

CHICAGO IN AUGUST When Cynthia's father homeward brought An India mull for her to wear, How were her handsome features fraught With radiant smiles beyond compare!

And to her bosom Cynthia strained Her pa with many a fond caress- And ere another week had waned That mull was made into a dress.

And Cynthia blooming like a rose Which any swain might joy to cull, Cried "How I'll paralyze the beaux When I put on my India mull!"

Now let the heat of August day Be what it may-I'll not complain- I'll wear the mull, and put away This old and faded-out delaine!

Despite her prayers the heated spell Descended not on mead and wold- Instead of turning hot as-well, The weather turned severely cold, The Lake dashed up its icy spray And breathed its chill o'er all the plain- Cynthia stays at home all day And wears the faded-out delaine!

So is Chicago at this time- She stands where icy billows roll- She wears her beauteous head sublime, While cooling zephyrs thrill her soul.

But were she tempted to complain, Methinks she'd bid the zephyrs lull, That she might doff her old delaine And don her charming India mull!

But there was another feature of Chicago that from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure to that land where dust troubleth not and soot and filth are unknown, filled his New England soul and nostrils with ineffable disgust. He never became reconciled to a condition in which the motto in hoc signo vinces on a bar of soap had no power to inspire a ray of hope. He had not been here a month before his muse began to wield the "knotted lash of sarcasm" above the strenuous but dirty back of Chicago after this fas.h.i.+on:

Brown, a Chicago youth, did woo A beauteous Detroit belle, And for a month-or, maybe, two- He wooed the lovely lady well.

But, oh! one day-one fatal day- As mused the belle with naught to do, A local paper came her way And, drat the luck! she read it through.

She read of alleys black with mire- A river with a putrid breath- Streets reeking with malarial ire- Inviting foul disease and death.

Then, with a livid snort she called Her trembling lover to her side- "How dare you, wretched youth," she bawled, "Ask me to be your blus.h.i.+ng bride?

Go back unto your filthy town, And never by my side be seen, Nor hope to make me Mrs. Brown, Until you've got your city clean!"

Eugene Field made his first appearance in the column of the Morning News August 15th, 1883, in the most modest way, with a scant column of paragraphs such as he had contributed to the Denver Tribune, headed "Current Gossip" instead of "Odds and Ends." The heading was only a makes.h.i.+ft until a more distinctive one could be chosen in its stead. On August 31st, 1883, the t.i.tle "Sharps and Flats" was hoisted to the top of Field's column, and there it remained over everything he wrote for more than a dozen years.

There have been many versions of how Field came to hit upon this t.i.tle, so appropriate to what appeared under it. The most ingenious of these was that evolved by John B. Livingstone in "An Appreciation" of Eugene Field, published in the Interior shortly after his death. In what, on the whole, is probably the best a.n.a.lysis of Field's genius and work extant, Mr. Livingstone goes on to say:

"What Virgil was to Tennyson, Horace was to Field in one aspect at least of the Venusian's character. He could say of his affection for the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of the happy t.i.tyrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation of the eighth of the first book of Horatian Satires:

Not to be tedious or repeat How Flats and Sharps in concert meet.

"Field's knowledge of Horace and of his translators was complete, probably not equalled by that of any other member of his craft. He made a specialty of the study, a hobby of it. And it is more likely, as it is more gratifying, to believe that he caught his famous caption (Sharps and Flats) from a paraphrase of his favorite cla.s.sic poet than from the play bill of a modern and ephemeral farce."

Unfortunately for this pretty bit of speculation, which Field would have enjoyed as another evidence of his skill in imposing upon the elect of criticism, it has no foundation in fact, and its premises of Field's intimate knowledge and devotion to Horace antic.i.p.ates the period of his Horatian "hobby," as Mr. Livingstone so well styles it, by at least five years. It was not until the winter of 1888-89 that paraphrases of Horace began to stud his column with the first-fruits of his tardy wandering and philandering with Dr. Frank W. Reilly through the groves and meadows of the Sabine farm. But that is another story.

According to M.E. Stone, the t.i.tle of the column which Field established when he came to the Chicago Morning News was borrowed from the name of a play, "Sharps and Flats," written by Clay M. Greene and myself, and played with considerable success throughout the United States by Messrs. Robson and Crane.

It may be set down here as well as elsewhere, and still quoting Mr. Stone, that not only did Field write nearly every line that ever appeared in the "Sharps and Flats" column, but that practically everything that he ever wrote, after 1883, appeared at one time or another in that column.

To which it may be added that it has been the custom of those writing of Eugene Field to surround and endow him throughout his career with the acquirement of scholars.h.i.+p, and pecuniary independence, which he never possessed before the last six years of his life.

Practically all Field's scholars.h.i.+p and mental equipment, so far as they were obtained from books, were acquired after he came to Chicago, and he was never lifted above the ragged edge of impecuniosity until he began to receive royalties from the popular edition of "A Little Book of Western Verse" and "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." His domestic life was spent in flats or rented houses until less than five months before his death. The photographs taken a few months before his death of Eugene Field's home and the beautiful library in which he wrote are ghastly travesties on the nomadic character of his domestic arrangements for many years before June, 1895-dreams for which he longed, but only lived to realize for four brief months. All the best Field wrote previous to 1890-and it includes the best he ever wrote, except "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"-was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's "Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholars.h.i.+p or surroundings, but on the companions.h.i.+p of his fellows and the unconventionality of his home life.

CHAPTER XII

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

It was in the month of September, after Field's coming to the Morning News, that a managerial convulsion in the office of the Chicago Herald threw the majority of its editorial corps and special writers across Fifth Avenue into the employ of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. They were at first distributed between the morning and evening editions of the News, my first work being for the latter, to which I contributed editorial paragraphs for one week, when Mr. Stone concluded to make me his chief editorial writer on the Morning News. This brought me into immediate personal and professional relations with Field. Our rooms adjoined, being separated by a board part.i.tion that did not reach to the ceiling and over which for four years I was constantly bombarded with missives and missiles from my ever-restless neighbor. Among the other recruits from the Herald at that time was John F. Ballantyne, who, from being the managing editor of that paper, was transferred to the position of chief executive of the Morning News under Mr. Stone. One of the first duties of his position was to read Field's copy very closely, to guard against the publication of such bitter innuendoes and scandalous personalities as had kept the Denver Tribune in constant hot water between warlike descents upon the editor and costly appeals to the courts. Mr. Stone wanted all the racy wit that had distinguished Field's contributions to the Tribune without the attendant crop of libel suits, and he relied on Ballantyne's Scotch caution to put a query mark against every paragraph that squinted at a breach of propriety or a breach of the peace, or that invited a libel suit. There was no power of final rejection in Ballantyne's blue pencil. That was left for Mr. Stone's own decision. It was well that it was so, for Mr. Ballantyne's appreciation of humor was so rigid that, had it been the arbiter as to which of Field's paragraphs should be printed, I greatly fear me there would often have been a dearth of gayety in the "Sharps and Flats." The relations in which Ballantyne and I found ourselves to Field can best be told in the language of Mr. Cowen, whose own intimate relations with Field antedated ours and continued to the end:

"Coming immediately under the influence of John Ballantyne and Slason Thompson, respectively managing editor and chief editorial writer of the News-the one possessed of Scotch gravity and the other of fine literary taste and discrimination-the character of Field's work quickly modified, and his free and easy, irregular habits succ.u.mbed to studious application and methodical labors. Ballantyne used the blue pencil tenderly, first attacking Field's trick fabrications and suppressing the levity which found vent in preceding years in such pictures of domestic felicity as:

Baby and I the weary night Are taking a walk for his delight, I drowsily stumble o'er stool and chair And clasp the babe with grim despair, For he's got the colic And paregoric Don't seem to ease my squalling heir.

Baby and I in the morning gray Are griping and squalling and walking away- The fire's gone out and I nearly freeze- There's a smell of peppermint on the breeze.

Then Mamma wakes And the baby takes And says, "Now cook the breakfast please."

"The every-day practical joker and entertaining mimic of Denver recoiled in Chicago from the reputation of a Merry Andrew, the prospect of gaining which he disrelished and feared. He preferred to invent paragraphic pleasantries for the world at large and indulge his personal humor in the office, at home, or with personal friends. Gayety was his element. He lived, loved, inspired, and translated it, in the doing which latter he wrote, without strain or embarra.s.sment, reams of prose satire, contes risques, and Hudibrastic verse."

It is a singular ill.u.s.tration of the irony and mutations of life that one of the early paragraphs Field wrote for the "Sharps and Flats" column was inspired by what was supposed to be a fatal a.s.sault on his friend by a notorious political ruffian in Leadville. The paragraph, which appeared on September 12th, 1883, is interesting as a specimen of Field's style at that period, and as showing in what esteem he held Cowen, with whom he had been a.s.sociated on the Denver Tribune and whose name recurs in these pages from time to time:

Edward D. Cowen, the city editor of the Leadville Herald, who was murderously a.s.saulted night before last by a desperado named Joy, was one of the brightest newspaper men in the West. He came originally from Ma.s.sachusetts, and has relatives living in the southern part of Illinois. He was about thirty years of age. He went to Leadville about three months ago to work on ex-Senator Tabor's paper, the Herald, and was doing excellently well. He was a protege, to a certain extent, of Mrs. Tabor No. 2. She admired his brilliancy, and volunteered to help him in any possible way. It was speaking of him that she said: "My life will henceforth be devoted to a.s.sisting worthy young men. In life we must prepare for death, and how can we better prepare for death than by helping our fellow-creatures? Alas!" she added with a sad, sad sigh, "alas! death is, after all, what we live for." Young Cowen had all the social graces men and women admire; he was bright in intellect, great in heart, and hearty of manner. The loss of no young man we know of would be more deplored than his demise.

Cowen never wholly recovered from the effects of his encounter with Joy, but he survived to joke with Field over the past tense in which this paragraph is couched, and to afford me valuable a.s.sistance in completing this character-study of our friend.

I have already referred to the "box stall" in which Field sawed his daily wood, as he was accustomed to call his work. As the day of thinking that any old pine table, with a candle box for a chair, crowded off in any sort of a dingy garret, was good enough for the writers who contributed "copy" for a newspaper, has been succeeded by an era of quarter-sawed oak desks, swivel chairs, electric light, and soap and water in editorial quarters throughout the country, let me attempt to describe the original editorial rooms of the Daily News less than twenty years ago. The various departments of the paper occupied what had been three four-story, twenty-five-foot buildings. The floors of no two of these buildings above the first story were on the same level. They had evidently been originally built for lodging houses. The presses and storerooms for the rolls of paper filled the cellars. The business office occupied one store, which was flanked on either side by stores that would have been more respectable had they been rented as saloons, which they were not, because of the conscientious scruples of Messrs. Lawson & Stone. Parts of two of the buildings were still rented as lodgings. Up one flight of stairs of the centre building, in the front, Mr. Stone had his office, which was approached through what had been a hall bedroom. His room was furnished with black walnut, and a gloomy and oppressive air of mystery. Mr. Stone had the genius and the appearance of a chief inquisitor. He was as alert, daring, and enterprising an editor as the West has ever produced.

The rear of this twenty-five-foot building was given up to the library and to George E. Plumbe, the editor for many years of the Daily News Almanac and Political Register. The library consisted of files of nearly all the Chicago dailies, of Congressional Records and reports, the leading almanacs, the "Statesman's Year Book," several editions of "Men of the Times," half a dozen encyclopaedias, the Imperial and Webster's dictionaries, a few other text books, and about two inches of genuine Chicago soot which incrusted everything. The theory advanced by Field's friend, William F. Poole, then of the Public Library and later of the Newberry Library, that dust is the best preservative of books, rendered it necessary that the only washstand accessible to the Morning News should be located in the library. None of us ever came out of that library as we went in-the one clean roller a day forbade it. Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our "copy" with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which Field has ill.u.s.trated, were held.

Before quitting the library, which has since grown, in new quarters, to be one of the most comprehensive newspaper libraries in the country, I cannot forbear printing one of Field's choice bits at the expense of the occupants of this floor of the Daily News office. It has no t.i.tle, but is supposed to be a soliloquy of Mr. Stone's:

I wish my men were more like Plumbe And not so much like me- I hate to see the paper hum When it should stupid be.

For when a lot of wit and rhyme Appears upon our pages, I know too well my men in time Will ask a raise in wages.

I love to sit around and chin With folk of doubtful fame, But oh, it seems a dreadful sin When others do the same; For others gad to get the news To use in their profession, But anything I get I use For purpose of suppression.

Field's poetical license here does injustice to Mr. Stone, whose inquisitions generally concerned matters of public or political concern and whose practice of the editorial art of suppression was never exercised with any other motive than the public good or the sound discretion of the editor, who knew that the libel suits most to be feared were those where the truth about some scalawag was printed without having the affidavits in the vault and a double hitch on the witnesses.