Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/231

 MORE OF EUGENE FIELD'S TRIALS IN LONDON

When I saw Gene in London about November, or the end of October, 1889, his enthusiasm for life in highbrow Grubb Street was already on the wane. Funds were low, so were his spirits, and the hopes he had set on James Gordon Bennett's enterprise had come to naught.

Mr. Bennett had been running the—or a—New York Herald in London for some time, kidding himself that London would accept a daily with so incongruous a title as a rival to the Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and so forth. And Eugene Field tried to persuade Bennett's representative, that it could be done provided that he had a column or a column and a half on the editorial page. His London Sharps and Flats were to be syndicated in America, the Chicago Daily News having the preference. And Gene hoped to get at least two hundred and fifty dollars a week out of the enterprise.

If he only had the money to go to Paris and stay there long enough to plead with James Gordon in person! But James Gordon, already a middle-aged man, continued to play the young buck and was seldom in his office for two consecutive days.

At one time, when Eugene had a hundred dollars laid aside for Paris, he received word, just in the nick of time, that the " 227