the labor of writing to a minimum. And he succeeded, for few pen-men
could exceed him in the rapidity with which he produced "copy" for the
printer and none excelled him in sending that copy to the compositor in
a form so free from error as to leave no question where blame for
typographical blunders lay. In over twenty years' experience in
handling copy I have only known one regular writer for the press who
wrote as many words to a sheet as Field. That was David H. Mason, the
tariff expert, whose handwriting was habitually so infinitesimal that
he put more than a column of brevier type matter on a single page,
note-paper size.

Strange to say, the compositors did not complain of this eye-straining
copy, which attracted them by its compactness and stretched out to
nearly half a column in the "strings" by which their pay was measured.
From this it may be inferred that there was never any complaint of
Field's manuscript from the most exacting and captious of all newspaper
departments--the composing room.

However, I set out to relate the genesis of Field's use of the colored
inks, with which he not only embellished his correspondence and
presentation copies of his verse, but with which he was wont to
illuminate his copy for the printer. It came about in this way:

In the winter of 1885 Walter Cranston Larned, author of the "Churches
and Castles of Mediæval France," then the art critic for the News,
contributed to it a series of papers on the Walters gallery in
Baltimore. These attracted no small attention at the time, and were the
subject of animated discussion in art circles in Chicago. They were
twelve in number, and ran along on the editorial page of the News from
February 23d till March 10th. At first we of the editorial staff took