ndings in a
Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had
his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of
nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is
yet characteristic of many New England families."

If the reader wishes to know more of the New England atmosphere, in
which Eugene Field was permitted to have pretty much his own sweet way
by his cousin and aunt, let him have recourse 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 author. In a letter to Mrs. Earle, from which I
quoted in the opening paragraph of this narrative, I find the following
reference to the period of his life which we are now considering:

"Fourteen years of my life were spent in Newfane, Vt., and Amherst,
Mass. My lovely old grandmother was one of the very elect. How many
times have I carried her footstove for her and filled it in the
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 meeting-house;
and the leader of the choir pitched the tune with a tuning-fork. As a
boy I used to play hi-spy in the horse-shed. But I am not so very
old--no, a man is still a boy at forty, isn't he?"

[Illustration: THE FIELD HOMESTEAD AT NEWFANE, VT.]

Eugene Field would have been a boy at fifty and at eighty had he lived,
and he was very much of a boy at the period of which he wrote to Mrs.
Earle. I have no doubt that he was a very circumspect lad while under
the loving yet stern glance of that dear old grandmother, in whose
kindly yet dignified presence three generations of Fields moved with
varying 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 jests, with great discretion pursued 'the even tenor of
her way.' Patiently and with unfaltering devotion to the higher and
nobler purposes of life, she always maintained her self-possession,
strenuously avoided all levity and frivolity, rarely relaxed the
gravity of her