Oh, my! I wuz so skeered that time I never slep' a

mite

It's almost alluz when I'm bad I see things at night!

Lucky thing I ain't a girl, or I'd be skeered to death!

Bein' I'm a boy, I duck my head an' hold my breath;

An' I am, oh! so sorry I'm a naughty boy, an' then I promise to be better an' I say my prayers again! Gran'ma tells me that's the only way to make it right

When a feller has been wicked an' sees things at night!

An' so, when other naughty boys would coax me into sin,

I try to skwush the Tempter's voice 'at urges me

within;

An' when they's pie for supper, or cakes 'at's big an'

nice,

I want to-but I do not pass my plate f'r them things twice!

No, ruther let Starvation wipe me slowly out o' sight Than I should keep a-livin' on an' seein' things at night!

H

EUGENE FIELD

OW rare is the man who seems to know just how children feel and just what children like! If such a man can write down some of these things which he and the children understand, but which many grown-up people do not, it is very certain that children all over the world will love him. Just such a man was Eugene Field, who wrote this Seein' Things at Night. He wrote a number of books for older people, but it is chiefly for his poems to children and about children that he is remembered.

We know some rather interesting things about Field's childhood. His mother died when he was only seven years old, and he was taken from Missouri to Amherst, Massachusetts, to be brought up by a cousin. His grandmother, who was very religious, saw that he was a bright boy, and hoped that he would be a preacher when he grew up. Just to get him into the habit, she used to pay him to write sermons, and it must have been a funny thing to see the child, who can never have been a very serious boy, bending over his sermons, bound to win his ninepence. When he became a man he used to smile at these sermons, especially at one in which he had said, "Oh, it is hard, indeed, for sinners to go down to perdition over all the obstacles God has placed in his path!"

Certainly the sermon-writing failed to make a

preacher of Field. After he left college he took a trip to Europe, and because he spent there all the fortune that had been left him, he found on his return that he would have to work hard for a living. It did not take him long to decide what he wanted to do; there was nothing that interested him more than newspaper work, and all the rest of his life he was engaged in that, working first on one paper, then on another. And in every place his brightness and cleverness made his department of the paper very popular.

In some ways Field was a boy all his life. He loved a practical joke, and was never too busy to play one on his friends, who sometimes became a little out of patience with him. However, they did not keep their anger long, for he had the knack of making people good-natured, and besides, he never played a joke that could hurt any one's feelings. Sometimes there would appear in some paper a poem signed with the name of one of Field's friends; a day or two later there would appear in another paper a most severe criticism of that poem. Field's friends knew that this was just one of his jokesthat he had written both the poem and the criticism; but all the people who read the papers did not know that.

One time Field was traveling about Missouri with Carl Schurz, candidate for senator, who was a German. At one place where Schurz was to speak, the man who was to introduce him did not appear, and Field was asked to say a few words of introduction. Assuming a strong German accent, that the people might think he was Schurz, he said: "Ladies and Chentlemans: I haf such a severe colt dot I cannot