EUGENE FIELD’S COUSINS, MARY FIELD FRENCH
  AND HER YOUNGER HALF-SISTER, AUGUSTA JONES 54
    From a Daguerreotype taken before Eugene and
    Roswell became members of Miss French’s family
    in Amherst, on the death of their mother.

  THE FIELD HOMESTEAD AT NEWFANE, VT. 56

  THE HOMESTEAD AT AMHERST, MASS. 60
    Now owned by Mr. Hiram Eaton, of New York.

  A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF MONSON, MASS. 74

  THE REV.  JAMES TUFTS 78

  WILLIAMS COLLEGE BUILDINGS, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. 82

  THE OLD KNOX COLLEGE BUILDINGS, GALESBURG, ILL. 86

  STATE UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS AT COLUMBIA, MO. 88

  EARLY PORTRAITS OF EUGENE FIELD 92

  MELVIN L. GRAY 96

  MRS. MELVIN L. GRAY 100

  MRS. EUGENE FIELD 110

  ROBSON AND CRANE IN “SHARPS AND FLATS” 204

  FIELD AT WORK 218
    The caricature from a drawing by Sclanders.

  FRANCIS WILSON 228

  WILLIAM J. FLORENCE 234

  MODJESKA 242

  JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS 256

  SOL SMITH RUSSELL 266

  DR. FRANK W. REILLY 280

  “FATHER PROUT” 288
    Francis Mahony.

EUGENE FIELD

CHAPTER I

PEDIGREE

“Sir John Maundeville, Kt.,” was his prototype, and Father Prout was his patron saint.  The one introduced him to the study of British balladry, the other led him to the classic groves of Horace.

“I am a Yankee by pedigree and education,” wrote Eugene Field to Alice Morse Earle, the author of “The Sabbath in Puritan New England,” and other books of the same flavor, “but I was born in that ineffably uninteresting city, St. Louis.”

How so devoted a child of all that is queer and contradictory in New England character came to be born in “Poor old Mizzoorah,” as he so often wrote it, is in itself a rare romance, which I propose to tell as the key to the life and works of Eugene Field.  Part of it is told in the reports of the Supreme Court of Vermont, part in the most remarkable special pleas ever permitted in a chancery suit in America, and the best part still lingers in the memory of the good people of Newfane and Brattleboro, Vt., where “them Field boys” are still referred to as unaccountable creatures, full of odd conceits, “an’ dredful sot when once they took a notion.”