speech from me then. As I was reluctantly urged up
the long graveled drive of the respectable wooden house near the Square,
I saw an old, white-haired man getting into his family carriage with
some difficulty. The large, heavy person of the owner of Clark's Field
seemed to me a very formidable object when he turned upon me a pair of
dark, scowling eyes beneath bushy white brows and muttered something
about "bad boys." Those eyes and a curious trembling of the heavy
limbs--due to palsy, I suppose--are the only things I recollect of
Samuel Clark. Nor do I remember what he said to me beyond calling me a
bad boy or what judgment he meted out. All I know is that I returned
home without visiting the "lockup" behind the Square and became the
subject of a protracted and animated family discussion. My mother,
unexpectedly, took my part, inveighing against the "ogre" of a Clark who
deprived "nice" boys of the enjoyment of his useless field, and urged my
father, who had some acquaintance with fact as well as with law, to "do
something about Clark's Field." My father, I think, was at last
persuaded to visit the owner of the field to see what lawful
arrangements could be made so that well-behaved boys might freely and
honorably use the Field for their pleasure, until it should be disposed
of to builders. (Which, of course, would have taken from it every shred
of charm!) Whether in fact he made some such arrangement I cannot
remember, nor whether having been once caught I was sufficiently
intimidated by my visit to old Clark. All I know is that as long as we
remained in Alton, the Field continued its useless, forlorn, unoccupied
existence, jealously surrounded by a dilapidated though constantly
patched fence, with its numerous signs inviting prospective purchasers
to consult with the "owner"--signs that were regularly destroyed by
succeeding generations of boys. Already in my youth the busy town was
growing far beyond Clark's Field, along the South Road towards the new
railroad station; but the Field remained in dreary isolation from all
this new life until long after I had left the town.

As I have said, this empty field of fifty acres was the most permanent
experience of my youth. Its large, level surface, so persistently
offered to unwilling purchasers of real estate, seized hold of my boyish
imagination. I invented mysterious reasons for its condition, which as
time went on must have been influenced by what I heard at the family