When she replied that she intended sending them to Mr. Field, the
little one said that she wanted so much to send Mr. Field a rose,
adding pathetically that she had no money. Deeply touched by the
child's sorrowful earnestness the lady picked out a yellow rose and
gave it to her, and when the coffin was lowered to the grave a wealth
of wreaths and designs was strewn around to mark the spot, but down
below the hand of the silent poet held only a little yellow rose, the
tribute of a child who did not know him in life, but in whose heart
nestled the love his songs had awakened and the magnetism of his great
humanity had stirred.

A few hours after his spirit had gone a crippled boy came to the house
and begged permission to go to the chamber. The wish was granted, and
the boy hobbled to the bedside. Who he was, and in what manner my
brother had befriended him, none of the family knew, but as he painfully
picked his way down stairs the tears were streaming over his face, and
the onlookers forgot their own sorrow in contemplation of his grief.
The morning of the funeral, while the family stood around the coffin,
the letter-carrier at Buena Park came into the room, and laying a bunch
of letters at the foot of the bier said reverently: "There is your last
mail, Mr. Field." Then turning with tears in his eyes, as if apologizing
for an intrusion, he added: "He was always good to me and I loved him."

It was this affection of those in humbler life that seems to speak the
more eloquently for the beneficence and the triumph of his life's work.
No funeral could have been less ostentatious, yet none could have been
more impressive in the multitude that overflowed the church, or more
conformable to his tenacious belief in the democracy of man. People of
eminence, of wealth, of fashion, were there, but they were swallowed up
in the great congregation of those to whom we are bound by the ties of