GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
Though close—ah! close—the droplight
That classic head revealed,
She was to him Miss Katharine,
He—naught but Mister Field;
Decorum graced his upright brow
And thinned his lips serene,
And, though he wrote a poem each hour,
Why should she call him "Gene"?
She gazed at his sporadic hair—
She knew his hymns by rote;
They longed to dine together
At Casey's table d'hôte;
Alas, that Fortune's "hostages"—
But let us draw a screen!
He dared not call her Katie;
How could she call him "Gene"?
I signed my verses "By one of Gene's Victims"; they appeared in The Tribune, and soon were copied by papers in every part of the country. Other stanzas, with the same refrain, were added by the funny men of the Southern and Western press, and it was months before "Gene" saw the last of them. The word "Eugenio," which was the name by which I always addressed him in our correspondence, left him in no doubt as to the initiator of the series, and so our "Merry War" ended, I think, with a fair quittance to either side.
Grieving, with so many others, over Yorick's premature death, it is a solace for me to remember how pleasant was our last interchange of written words. Not long ago, he was laid very low by pneumonia, but recovered, and before leaving his sick-room wrote
[190]
