Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/227

 EUGENE FIELD AND HIS TROUBLES IN CHICAGO

We had been fellow coffee-drinkers and fellow pie-eaters in Chicago since the early eighties, at a time when beefsteak, fried potatoes, apple pie and cheese constituted an American table d'hote and whiskey was the beverage for Man. Women never touched it in those days, and American wines were so little esteemed, that a bottle was given away free, gratis and for nothing to each guest at Palmer House dinners.

Mike McDonald was king of Chicago, Luther Laflin Mills was State's Attorney and Carter Harrison was Mayor time and again. All the newspaper men borrowed money from Mike and drank at the expense of Luther Laflin when he ran for office.

Eugene Field, of course, was the Sharps and Flats man of the widely circulated Daily News: I was a writer on foreign affairs for the Chicago Times, the paper "that would set the town by the ears daily or burst." The Times office was diagonally across from the News office, and from the News office we turned to the left into Randolph Street, where the general hang-out, Henrici's, was situated. 223