E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa Er-Raqabi, Leah Moser,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE WRITINGS IN PROSE AND VERSE OF EUGENE FIELD
ECHOES FROM THE SABINE FARM
by
Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
1899
INTRODUCTION
One Sunday evening in the winter of 1890 Eugene Field and thewriter were walking in Lake View, Chicago, on their way to visitthe library of a common friend, when the subject of publishing abook for Field came up for discussion.
The Little Book of Western Verse and The Little Book ofProfitable Tales had been privately printed the year before atChicago, and Field had been frequently reminded that the writer wasready and willing to stand sponsor for any new volume he, Field,might desire to bring out.
"The only thing I have on hand that might make a book," saidField, "are some few paraphrases of the Odes of Horace which mybrother, 'Rose,' and I have been fooling over, and which, truth totell, are certainly freely rendered. There are not enough of them,but we'll do some more, and I'll add a brief Life of Horace as apreface or introduction."
It is to be regretted that Field never carried out his intentionwith respect to this last, for he had given much thought and studyto the great Roman satirist, and what Eugene Field could have saidupon the subject must have been of interest. It is my belief thatas he thought upon the matter it grew too great for him to handlewithin the space he had at first determined, and that tucked awaywithin the recesses of his literary intentions was thedetermination, nullified by his early death, to write, conamore, a life of Quintus Horatius Flaccus.
This determination to write separately an extended account ofHorace greatly reduced the bulk of the material intended for theSabine Echoes, and it was with respect to this that Fieldapologetically and, as was his wont, humorously wrote:
"The volume may be rather thin in corpore, but think howhefty it will be intellectually."
When it came to the discussion of how many copies should beprinted it was suggested that the edition be an exceedingly limitedone, in order to cause as much scrambling and heartburning aspossible among our bibliophilic brethren. And never shall I forgetthe seriousness of the man's face, nor the roars of laughter thatfollowed, when he suggested that fifty copies only should be made,and that we should reserve one each and burn the otherforty-eight!
It was a biting cold night and we had been loitering by the way,stopping to debate each point as it arose—but now we plungedon with excess of motion to keep ourselves warm, breaking out withoccasional peals of laughter as we thought of our plan to make thepublication what the booksellers call "excessively rare."
Field, elsewhere, has said he did not know why the originalintention as to the destruction of the forty-eight copies was notcarried out, but the answer is not far away. As the time forpublication approached it was found impossible that such and such afriend should be forgotten in the matter of a copy, and so it wenton until it was deemed prudent to add fifty to the numberoriginally intended to be issued, and that decision, in the lightof what followed, proved to be an eminently wise one. More thanonce some to me unknown friend of Field would write a pleasant lieas