It was while a junior at the University of Missouri that Eugene Field made the acquaintance of Edgar V. Comstock, the sharer of the European trip and experiences.  Now Edgar’s parents lived at St. Joseph, and with them five sisters, the Misses Ida, Carrie, Georgia, Julia Sutherland, and Gussie Comstock, and the fairest of them all was Julia, albeit, at the time her brother was in college, she was still in short dresses.  What more natural than that Edgar’s elder sisters should visit him during his college term and there meet and be attracted by the gaunt, yet already unique and striking, figure of Eugene Field, the most unscholarly student and most incorrigible wag in Columbia?  Julia was too young at this time, in the estimation of her sisters, to travel so far from St. Jo.  Besides, what interest would a little girl in short skirts take in the grave and intellectual life of the brother and his undergraduate friends?

Out of the friendship of Eugene and Edgar and the visit of Edgar’s sisters to Columbia, fate was weaving a web for the unsuspecting subject of this narrative which was not to be denied or altered by leaving little Julia to rusticate at home like another pretty little Cinderella.  But this is not a fairy tale.  It has no prince or glass slippers or pumpkin coaches, with which Field’s fancy could have invested it.  When the two friends separated on Commencement Day, after Field had delivered an oration that impressed Miss Ida (Mrs. Below), because of “his pale face and deep voice,” a promise had been extorted that he would visit the Comstocks in their home in St. Joseph.

In the usual course of human events nothing further of concern to us would have come from the exchange of these common civilities of student life.  Edgar would have returned to his home and forgotten Eugene, and Eugene would have gone his way and never known that Edgar had a younger sister Julia sitting at the gate awaiting the coming of her prince.  But shortly after returning to St. Louis, Field was inspired by his natural roving restlessness—­the French call it Fate—­to run clear across the state of Missouri, some three hundred miles, to see what kind of a town St. Joseph was and incidentally to visit his college friend.  Nearly twenty years later, in the gathering gloom of a rented apartment in London, the still-constant lover wrote of what happened when he first saw “Saint Jo, Buchanan County,” in the early seventies.  There he first met “the brown-eyed maiden” of his song, the Julia of numberless valentines that ran the gamut of grave and gay through the intervening years, the heroine of frequent drives which they “snailed along,” as their proper horse went slow,

  In those leafy aisles, where Cupid smiles
    In Lover’s Lane, Saint Jo.

* * * * *

  Ah! sweet the hours of springtime
    When the heart inclines to woo,
  And it’s deemed all right for the callow wight
    To do what he wants to do.