As when the bright, the ever-glorious sun
    In eastern slopes lifts up his flaming head,
  And sees the harm the envious night has done
    While he, the solar orb, has been abed—­
  Sees here a yawl wrecked on the slushy sea,
    Or there a chestnut from its roost blown down,
  Or last year’s birds’ nests scattered on the lea,
    Or some stale scandal rampant in the town—­
  Sees everywhere the petty work of night,
    Of sneaking winds and cunning, coward rats,
  Of hooting owls, of bugaboo and sprite,
    Of roaches, wolves, and serenading cats—­

  Beholds and smiles that bagatelles so small
    Should seek to devastate the slumbering earth—­
  Then smiling still he pours on one and all
    The warmth and sunshine of his grateful mirth;
  So he who rules in humor’s vast domain,
    Borne far away by some Ohio train,
  Returns again, like some recurring sun,
    And shining, God-like, on the furrowed plain
  Repairs the ills that envious hands have done._

But the daring violation of Field’s confidence effected its purpose.  Never again did he employ the type-worn expressions of country journalism, except with set prepense and self-evident satire.  He shunned them as he did an English solecism, which he never committed, save as a decoy to draw the fire of the ever-watchful and hopeless grammatical purist.

CHAPTER XVI

NATURE OF HIS DAILY WORK

In the last chapter I have told in general terms how Field employed himself day by day, from which the reader may form the impression that between eleven A.M. and midnight not over one-quarter of his time was actually employed in work, the balance being frittered away in seeming play.  In one sense the reader would be right in such an inference.  Field worked harder and longer at his play than at what the world has been pleased to accept as the work of a master workman, but out of that play was born the best of all that he has left.  His daily column was a crystallization of the busy fancies that were running through his head during all his hours of fooling and nights of light-hearted pleasure.  It reflected everything he read and heard and saw.  It was a “barren sea from which he made a dry haul”—­a dreary and colorless gathering that left him without material for his pen.  He did not hunt for this material with a brass band, but went for it with studied persistence.  Field never believed that he was sent into the world to reform it.  His aim was to amuse himself, and if in so doing he entertained or gratified others, so much the better.  “Reform away,” he was once reported as saying, “reform away, but as for me, the world is good enough for me as it is.  I am a thorough optimist.  In temperament I’m a little like old Horace—­I want to get all the happiness out of the world that’s possible.”  And he got it, not intermittently and in chunks, but day by day and every hour of the day.