When the last pair of spurs had begun to click to the wearer's forward step, I glanced into the room in which these men of many lands had assembled and, to my consternation, saw a scarlet-clad figure entering its farthest door. Again Cardinal Gibbons had been overlooked, and to save an unpleasant situation, I introduced myself forthwith as one appointed to await his coming. Offering him my arm, I led him past a slowly moving procession to a place near its head belonging to him as a prince of the church; and from that chance meeting I have carried through the years an impression of an upright man, at once kindly and courtly, in a word, "a wealthy priest, but rich without a fault."

Still, in spite of my arduous duties, this performance lingers in memory, together with Celia's words in the play, as "wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful." It had, in fact, a joyousness, a naturalness, and a youthful buoyancy such as I have never seen beneath a spot-light. Ada Rehan, girlish and exuberant, was "Rosalind of many parts," the virtuous Orlando being John Drew who, though verging on forty, still looked to be a youth of twenty. "The melancholy Jaques" was played by George Clarke, and Audrey, "honest in deed and word," by pretty Isabelle Irving.

James Lewis, the inimitable, was Touchstone; yet upon the first sunny day of a rainy June the part was not to his liking, his legs, though still nimble, being, alas! rheumatic. So, when not making merry as a motley fool, he stood upon a pair of wooden blocks which when it became his cue to cry, "Come apace, good Audrey, I will fetch up your goats," he hid behind a tree. Yet he but cursed beneath his breath the cruel lord and manager who had forced him to play upon wet grass; whereas John Drew, when he appeared in grease-paint in the dazzling glare of a noonday sun, nearly broke up the performance; for when Ada Rehan saw him she burst into laughter, "John," said she in a perfectly audible stage whisper, "you look like a Pawnee." The audience meanwhile joined the chaste Rosalind in her mirth, the actors being unable to play their parts coherently until Orlando had removed his war-paint.

This thought of John Drew, grease-painted in broad daylight, recalls a joyous evening passed with him in the little cafe" which in more convivial days than these was to be found in the tunnel under Congress Street connecting two of Chicago's hotels. There, with a zither-player who made sweet music for us upon his instrument and the waiter who served us from time to time as our sole companions, John and I made good cheer while chatting the whole night through; for when we emerged, the sun was rising over a wind-swept lake. Alas! I wonder if friendship such as a poet has ealled "the mysterious cement of the soul" is not doomed to disappear from the face of American earth!

Had Eugene Field never yielded to any worldly temptation, had he been animated solely by a spirit such as the one that caused his ancestors and mine to lash helpless women with bared backs through the streets of New England towns merely because they were Quakers,—a spirit still abroad, I fear, — could he have penned the generous and sympathetic words of this letter received from him at the time my first book, a novel of Chicago, was being slated by the local critics?

"My dear Taylor: If you intend to follow writing as a profession, you must cultivate your skin until it becomes a hide—the hide of a pachyderm. I have been all through the experience with which you are beginning. The Herald said of my first book that it was evidently written by a man who lampooned Chicago society because he could n't get into it. I believe it is better to be antagonized than to be patronized. Go right along doing the best work of which you are capable and you are bound to succeed in spite of the ill will of some people. There are in the midst of us many who, incapable of ambitious endeavor, themselves, envy and hate those who do try to do somewhat and to be somebody. Do not let these creatures worry you. After a while they will be only too glad to fawn upon you. With all faith in your future, and with honest regard for your abilities, ambition and pluck, I am and shall be ever your friend,

"Eugene Field.
"December the tenth, 1891."

Others who are gone cross the stage of memory like actors after the curtain has fallen: my debonair friends and clever publishers, Herbert S. and Melville E. Stone, Jr., sons of a grand old father, and victims, the one of the Lusitania, the other of a dread disease; Major Lyman B. Glover, the dramatic critic, who, by inducing me to talk upon Moliere in a course of lectures he was arranging for a woman's club, led me unawares into a path in which I wandered for years; and engaging "Biff" Hall, too, newspaper man, justice of the peace, and scintillating president of the Forty Club in the days when every actor in the land who starred enjoyed its hospitality. One by one they pass: William Morton Payne, apostle of good literature; Bert Leston Taylor, with his "Line o' Type or Two" to rival "Sharps and Flats"; Emerson Hough, his glance as keen as that of the pioneer sitting rifle in hand in a covered wagon; and, finally, Charles Francis Browne, the modest painter whose heart was the bravest I have ever known, whose ideals were dimmed only by death.

The most enchanting heart still beats, I am glad to say, though shyly, in the breast of Henry B. Fuller, whose grace of style and whimsicality led James Russell Lowell to exclaim, after reading "The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani," "A precious book; it tastes of genius." To us (we are, alas! too few) who know his insight, subtlety, and quaint perception, the books of "Henry B.," as we fondly call him, are precious still; and since his mind is of "a diviner pattern" than any of ours, he fulfils for us Horace's conception of a genius.

High up in a sky-scraper that has been profitably consecrated to the fine arts there is a studio leased by Ralph Clarkson, doyen of Chicago painters. On one of its walls hangs "Las Meninas," reproduced by the tenant's skilled hand; and, to invoke with still more incongruity in the midst of a city seething with commerce not only the spirit of Velasquez, but of his land as well, there stands against another wall a Spanish cabinet with rusty lock and a nest of tiny drawers inlaid with ivory and gold. Into this soothing spot "Henry B." flutters on Friday in his shy way, for while it is a painter's studio six days of the week, on Dies Veneris it is "The Little Room."

A wealth of charming memory lies for me in this name of a club composed of Chicagoans who practise the fine arts, a name derived, I believe, from the title of a story by one of its founders, in which there is a ghostly little room that disappears and reappears at intervals. To me, however, it is Shakspere's "little room confining mighty men." A grandiose phrase, perhaps, with which to describe a studio where the few and lonely artists of a commercial city gather to talk joyfully for an hour, while drinking tea together, a language not of its streets. But if, as Bulwer Lytton says, "The pen is mightier than the sword," those who use it should be mightier than warriors; and if this be so, are not the wielders of both brush and chisel mighty, too, I ask?

But mighty men alone are not to be found in the Little Room. At a table, in fact, where Clara Laughlin is pouring tea from a samovar (if you 're going to Paris be sure to make her acquaintance), I see, in memory, Jane Addams sitting beside Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler, and surely they are mighty women. Elia W. Peattie, delightful as her stories, perceptive as her book-reviews, sits there, too, in company with valiant Anna Morgan, whose love for Chicago is "a malady without a cure," and upon whose little stage, two floors below, many a play by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Yeats, or Lady Gregory has received at the hands of her clever pupils its first American performance.

In a corner, where there is a divan beneath a hanging lamp, is Harriet Monroe, founder of "Poetry" and discoverer of poets, and there in "sweet clover," too, sits Clara Louise Burnham, side by side with Edith Wyatt, who is enjoying "great companions," I suspect; for hovering near, with cup in hand, I see Lorado Taft, and Robert Herrick. Of "men of enchanting spirit" there is, indeed, "dear variety": Will Payne, for example; Henry Kitchell Webster; I. K. Friedman; Frederic Clay Bartlett; and "Bob" Peattie, as I am constrained to call him, "Robert Bruce" being far too stately a name for one of his good-fellowship and parts.

Yes, and into that room of dear memory come the McCuteheons,— John T., cartoonist and mighty hunter, with his Majesty, George Barr of Graustark; likewise Harrison Rhodes, another delightful friend, who sits afar off today upon a reviewing-stand. At the threshold these three are greeted, as is every one, by Ralph Clarkson, most courteous of painters, and in their wake I see George Ade, Rex Beach, and "Mr. Dooley," though they are but occasional visitors rather than habitue's of the Little Room. But standing near its steaming samovar of a certainty are Wallace Rice, the poet, and Oliver Dennett Grover, the painter. There of a certainty, too, expounding his views upon art, is Hamlin Garland, "the handsome Westerner," as Mr. Thomas Beer calls him, who has done fine things besides writing, such as creating the Cliff Dwellers Club, but nothing half so fine as being "the rescuing angel" of Stephen Crane.

Indeed, it is not as the world's butcher that I dream of Chicago, nor as a smoke-ridden Babel where thirty tongues are spoken by as many alien races, and murder is of almost daily occurrence. Rather is it of a city out of which a university sprang fully equipped, like Athens from the head of Zeus, and where from the ashes of a holocaust three libraries have arisen; a city, moreover, where a hall for an orchestra and an auditorium to house a civic opera company have been built by the public spirit of its citizens, as well as one in which a marble museum of natural history and an art institute attended by more students and entered by more visitors than any other in the land are standing where, in boyhood, I sailed with my father in a white-winged sloop. But the Chicago of my deepest affection is under the skylights where the painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers who are my dear friends still strive with might and main to foster and spread abroad the spirit of the idealism that has brought these and other fine things to pass within the material place in which I was born, a city that has grown fifteen-fold during my lifetime, and numbers now some three million souls instead of a paltry two hundred thousand.