to look back at the small boy and picture him sympathizing with his
little friend tormented by the heat and the pests of his kind, and
making him sigh for the rest that seemed to lurk in the rustling leaves
of the stately elms. Perhaps it was not astonishing poetry even for a
child, but was there not something in the fancy, the sentiment, and the
rhythm which bespoke far more than ordinary appreciation? Is it not this
same quality of alert and instinctive sympathy which has run through
Eugene Field's writings and touched the spring of popular affection?

Dooley went to the dog heaven many years ago. Finnikin and Poog and Boog
and the scores of boyhood friends that followed them have passed to
their Pythagorean reward; but the boy who first found in them the
delight of companionship and the kindlings of imagination retained all
the youthful impulses which made him for nearly half a century the lover
of animal life and the gentle singer of the faithful and the good.

Comradeship was the indispensable factor in my brother's life. It was
strong in his youth; it grew to be an imperative necessity in later
years. In the theory that it is sometimes good to be alone he had
little or no faith. Even when he was at work in his study, when it was
almost essential to thought that he should be undisturbed, he was never
quite content unless aware of the presence of human beings near at
hand, as betrayed by their voices. It is customary to think of a poet
wandering off in the great solitudes, standing alone in contemplation
of the wonderful work of nature, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean,
in the paths of the forest or on the mountain side. My brother was not
of this order. That he was primarily and essentially a poet of humanity
and not of nature does not argue that he was insensible to natural
beauty or natural grandeur. Nobody could have been more keenly
susceptible to the influences of nature in their temperamental effect,