Although Eugene Field made his first essay in journalism as a reporter, there is not the shadow of a tradition that he made any more progress along the line of news-gathering and descriptive writing than he did as a student at Williams.  He had too many grotesque fancies dancing through his whimsical brain to make account or “copy” of the plain ordinary facts that for the most part make up the sum of the news of the average reporter’s day.  What he wrote for the St. Louis Journal or Times-Journal, therefore, had little relation to the happening he was sent out to report, but from the outset it possessed the quality that attracted readers.  The peculiarities and not the conventions of life appealed to him and he devoted himself to them with an assiduity that lasted while he lived.  Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members.  He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print.  He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and held all night sessions of story and song with the choice spirits to be found on the floors and in the lobbies of every western legislature.  I wonder why I wrote “western” when the species is as ubiquitous in Maine as in Colorado?  From such sources Field gleaned the infinite fund of anecdote and of character-study which eventually made him the most sought-for boon companion that ever crossed the lobby of a legislature or of a state capital hotel in Missouri, Colorado, or Illinois.  He was a looker-on in the legislative halls, and right merrily he lampooned everything he saw.  Nothing was too trivial for his notice, nothing so serious as to escape his ridicule or satire.

There was little about his work at this time that gave promise of anything beyond the spicy facility of a quick-witted, light-hearted western paragrapher.  Looking back it is possible, however, to discover something of the flavor of the inextinguishable drollery that persisted to his last printed work in such verses as these in the St. Louis Journal: 

  THE NEW BABY

  We welcome thee, eventful morn
  Since to the poet there is born
        A son and heir;
  A fuzzy babe of rosy hue,
  And staring eyes of misty blue
        Sans teeth, sans hair.

  Let those who know not wedded joy
  Revile this most illustrious boy—­
        This genial child! 
  But let the brother poets raise
  Their songs and chant their sweetest lays
        To him reviled.

  Then strike, O bards, your tuneful lyres,
  ’Awake, O rhyming souls, your fires,
        And use no stint! 
  Bring forth the festive syrup cup—­
  Fill every loyal beaker up
        With peppermint!