Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions

slave, Dred Scott, he met, and more to the purpose of this narrative, became interested in Miss Frances Reed, then of St. Louis, but whose parents hailed from Windham County, Vermont. Whether their c

quiet nature. They were married in May, 1848, and in the love and domestic happiness of his mature manhood, Roswell Field

ich, under Time's transmuting and ironical fingers, has since become a noisy boiler-shop. There their first child was born. Subsequently they moved to the house, No. 634 South Fifth Street (now Broadway), which is one in the middle of a block of houses pointed out in St. Louis as the birthplace of Eugene Field. Alth

. Temperance Moon, of Farmington, Utah, who for a time lived in their fa

ister was living with them. Her name was Miss Arabella Reed. When they came back Roswell was a few months old. They went to live on Fifth Street in a three-story house. Mrs. Field sent word for me to come and take care of Eugene. I was twelve years old. She gave me full charge of him. I was very proud

e again the testimony of the younger brother is to the effect that in their youth the anniversary of Eugene's birth was held to be September 2d. Their father said he could not reconcile his mind to the thought that one of his children was born on so memorable an anniversary as September 3d, the day of Cromwell's death. I have little doubt that Field himself fostered the irrep

y of Eugene Field survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of the possession either

hoping to find with her, amid scenes familiar to his own youth, a home and affectionate care for his motherless boys. How the early loss of his mother affected the life of Eugene Field it is impossible to tell. Not until the boy of six whom she left had become a man of forty did he attempt t

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ved with her daughter, Mary Field French, to Amherst, Mass. To the home of Mrs. Jones and the loving care of Miss French, Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were en

of character and very gracious manners. She was always sociable and agreeable and so admirably adapted to the charge of the two brothers." They r

ive, the boys could not have found a more congenial home. Indeed, few mothers are able or even capable of doing so much for their own children as Mis

dmonition. Here he spent his school days, not in acquiring a broad or deep basis for future scholarship, but in studying the ways and whims of womankind, in practising the subtile arts whereby the boy of from six to fifteen attains a tyra

writes Roswell, "was similar to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish ple

to Mrs. Earle's "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," which I find in my library commended to my perusal, "with Eugene Field's love, December 25th, 1891"-and to other books by the same

e vestry-room. I have frozen in the old pew while grandma kept nice and warm and nibbled lozenges and cassia cakes during meeting. I remember the old sounding-board. There was no melodeon in that me

ng emotions of love and circumspection. "Her husband" (General Martin Field of our acquaintance), wrote "Uncle Charles Kellogg," "was genial and social, full of humor and mirth, oftentimes filling the house with his jocund laugh." She, however, "true to her refined womanly instinct, her sense of propriety, rarely disturbed by his merry and harmless je

tained in the following passage in an article

y. There was no cooking on Sunday. At noon Mrs. Deacon Ranney and other old ladies used to come from church with grandma to eat luncheon and discuss the sermon and suggest deeds of piety for the ensuing week. I remember Mrs. Deacon Ranney and her frigid companions very distinctly. They never smiled and they wore austere bombazines that rustled and squeaked dolorously. Mrs. Deacon Ranney seldom noticed me further than to regard me with a look that seemed to stigmatize me as an incipient vessel of wrath that was not to be approved of, and I never liked Mrs. Deacon Ranney after I heard her remi

the bag grandma carried a supply of crackers and peppermint lozenges, and upon these she would nibble in meeting whenever she felt that feeling of goneness in the pit of her stomach, which I was told old l

freedom Eugene and his brother enjoyed under the fond rule of Miss French at Amherst. But when I was in Newfane in 1899 I was informed by a dear old la

." He also confessed that all his love for nature dated from that visit. As a boy he would never have been permitted to indulge the fondness for animal pets under "the dark penetrating eyes" of his grandmother, that was tolerated and became a life-habit by the "gracious love" of Mary Field French. Of this fondness for pets, Roswell has written that it amounted to a passion. "But unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher sphere and to give them personality. For each pet, whether dog, cat, bird, goat, or squir

of evidence from Eugene Field's own pen of the surviva

"nay, under distress, that the mysterious veil of the editorial-room may properly be thrown aside and

t housewife in charge of the writer's domestic affairs. Jessie contributed to and participated in our work in this wise: She would sit and admiringly watch the writer at his work, wagging her abridged tail cordially whenever he bestowed a casual glance upon her, threatening violence to every intruder, warning her master of the approach of every garrulous visitor, and oftentimes, when she felt lonely, insisted on climbing u

usly every variety of intelligent antics. Whither we went she went, and at night she shared our couch with us. Though only nine mon

dog friend in Fullerton Avenue, and that was the last seen of her! Where can she have gone? It is very lonesome without Jessie. Moreover there are poems t

eft eye and warty cheek. She weighed perhaps twenty pounds (for Jessie never had dyspepsia), and one mark you surely could tell her by w

ustrious application to his work and his friends) the sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child who will bring Je

ing letter and his answer thereto, both

, Janua

some boy I guess took it off and never brought it back again. I have got a maltese cat and four beautiful kittens, and should like to send the gen

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uscripts and papers on the table. In the basement against the furnace, three beautiful fleecy little chickens have just hatched out. How long do you suppose it would be before that wicked little kitten discovered and compassed the demolition of those innocent baby fowls? Then again there are rabbits in the stable and very tame pigeons and the tiniest of bantam

leasure of its pretty antics. However, she must bear th

by Grace Greenwood and entitled 'The History of My Pets.' Even as a chi

e have so often wondered whether after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say less of pain out of life than the others. The tender heart seldom

-Legged Fyce," known in Miss French's household as "Dooley," that the boy Eugene attributed his

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er" and locate the scene of his "chronic repose" in St. Jo rather than under the flea-

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school was never eradicated from his life and writings. Nothing else influenced his work or affected his style as much as the morals and the literature of the Bible and the sacred songs that were lined out week after week from

f Wendell Phillips. It was more probably written when he was twelve or fourteen, as he showed at nine none of the signs of precocity which such a composition indicates. The youthful Chann

hard and to a battle in which a man must fight hard to win, t

asantness and her paths are peace. Under the word transgressor are included all those that disobey their maker, or, in sh

. A death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but before long he returns to his worldly lusts. Oh, it is indeed hard

bout on that awful rock that night would settle down on you and that you would fall from that giddy, giddy height, would you, I say, go near that dreadful rock? Just so with the

ssionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come. Mark how the sto

ter in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at

ged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general t

ermont exports, but we have noticed that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner, Mass., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called branch operating once per week between White River Junction and Montpelier, and a triweekly b

feeling when interpreted by an artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and passes in a tear."

rs and space, I seem to be among the Pelham hills again. The yonder glimpse of the Pacific becomes the silver thread of the Connecticut, seen, not over miles of orange-groves, but over broad acres of Indian corn; and instead of the pepper and eucalyptus, the lemon and the palm, I see (or I seem to see) the maple once more, and the elm and the chestnut trees, the shagbark walnut, the hickory, and the birch. In those days, these rugged mountains of this south land were unknown to me; and the Pelham hills were full of marvel and delight, with their tangled pathways and hidden stores of wintergr