"Suppose now there was a fearful precipice and to allure you there
your enemies should scatter flowers on its dreadful edge, would you
if you knew that while you were strolling about 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 transgressor, he falls from that height just
because he wishes to appear good in the sight of the world. But what
will a man gain if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

Whenever this was written it shows on its face that it is more an
effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty
years ago on the impressionable 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 stock words of the pulpiteer,
"transgressor," "worldly lusts," "dreadful," "awful," "perdition" stalk
fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint or sinner!

Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired
the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets,
and that later 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 all periods were never more than grotesque or
fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting
everything that came to his attention.

In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished
contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. One view was
tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered
at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general
tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under
discussion in the public press. It is illustrated in the following
paragraph:

The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very
best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission. This
may be true. At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest
Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce. She has no
commerce of her own, and she probably never will have. There is a
bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at
Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of
mention. There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports,
but we have not