had been some curious litigation. So the story grew that evening
over our dinner, to be filled in later by many details that came to me
unexpectedly,--I suppose because I was interested in the fate of Clark's
Field.

I

The Clarks, as their name implies, were of common English blood,
originally of some clerkly tribe and so possessing no distinctive
patronymic. These Clarks were ordinary Yankee farmers, who had been
settled in one place for upwards of two hundred years. Very likely some
ancestor of my old Samuel Clark had stood at Concord with "the embattled
farmers." I know not. He easily could have done so, for Alton was not
many miles distant from the battle field. But little either spiritual or
militant fervor from these Puritan ancestors seems to have come down to
Samuel, who in 1860 occupied the family farm of one hundred and forty
acres, "more or less," according to the loose description of old deeds.
Samuel, indeed, had not enough patriotism to sympathize with his son,
John Parsons, who finally ran off to the war, as so many boys did, to
escape the monotony of farm life. For Samuel, his father, was a plain,
ordinary, selfish, and not very thrifty New England farmer, who laid
down his fields every year to the same crops of oats and rye and hay,
kept a few sheep and hogs and cows, and in the easy, shiftless way of
his kind drained the soil of his old farm, with the narrow consolation
that it would somehow last his time.

So little ambition he had that shortly after his son went to the war,
thus depriving him of free labor, he "retired" from his farm,--that is,
he sold what he could of its fields and pastures and bought himself a
house on Church Street near the Square in Alton, probably the same house
where I was taken for my one interview with him. What he did not sell of
the farm he rented to another more energetic farmer, one Everitt Adams,
the old market-gardener whom I remembered. Adams with more thrift and
the great incentive of necessity built hothouses and went in for
market-gardening to supply the wants of the neighboring city, which was
already making itself felt upon the surrounding country. Hence the long
rows of celery, cabbage, lettuce, and peas that I remember across my
father's back fence. All the near-by farmers were doing much the same
thing, turning the better part of their land into gardens. They would
start before dawn in summer time for the city, making their way along
the South Roa