Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/25

 and pie diet. Did you see much of Gene while he was in London?"

I told Mark all I knew about Field's social and literary doings. "Bennett was right when he refused him a job on the London Herald," said Clemens. "For one thing, the Herald didn't last long, and the English climate would have cut poor Gene's life still shorter by two or three winters and falls."

Just the same, the desire for a London success, then common among American writers and artists, killed Eugene Field, the genial and lovable poet of childhood and man-about-literature's-highways-and-byways.

In the last days of

December, 1921.