I find no trace in the father of what, all through life, was the pre-eminent characteristic of Eugene, the inveterate painstaking, mirth-compelling practical-joker.  But in Brattleboro, Newfane, and throughout Vermont everybody says, “That’s jest like his uncle Charles Kellogg.  There was never such another for jest foolin’.  He’d rather play a hoax on the parson that would embarrass him in the face of his congregation than eat.”  When they were boys, it was Charles that led Roswell into all kinds of mischief.  “Uncle Charles Kellogg”—­they always give him the benefit of the second name in Brattleboro—­had a reputation for wit and never-ending badinage throughout the neighborhood that still survives and leaves no room to question whence Eugene inherited his unquenchable passion “for jest foolin’.”

CHAPTER IV

BIRTH AND EARLY YOUTH

For nine years after moving to St. Louis his profession was the sole mistress of Roswell Field’s “laborious days” and bachelor nights.  Almost coincident with his becoming interested in the case of the slave, Dred Scott, he met, and more to the purpose of this narrative, became interested in Miss Frances Reed, then of St. Louis, but whose parents hailed from Windham County, Vermont.  Whether their common nativity, or the fact that her father was a professional musician, first brought them together, the memory of St. Louis does not disclose.  Miss Reed was a young woman of unusual personal charm.  All accounts agree that she was quiet and refined in her ways and yet possessed that firmness of mind that is the salt of a quiet nature.  They were married in May, 1848, and in the love and domestic happiness of his mature manhood, Roswell Field found the sweet balm for the bitterness that followed from his youthful romance and the nullification of the Putney marriage.

Of this union six children were born in the eight years of Mrs. Field’s wedded life, only two of whom, Eugene, the second, and Roswell, survived babyhood.  There is some uncertainty as to the exact date and location of Eugene’s birth.  When his father was married he took his bride home to a house on Collins Street, which, under Time’s transmuting and ironical fingers, has since become a noisy boiler-shop.  There their first child was born.  Subsequently they moved to the house, No. 634 South Fifth Street (now Broadway), which is one in the middle of a block of houses pointed out in St. Louis as the birthplace of Eugene Field.  Although Eugene himself went with the photographer and pointed out the house, his brother Roswell strenuously maintains that Eugene was born before the family moved to the Walsh row, so-called, and that to the boiler-shop belongs the honor of having heard the first lullabies that greeted the ears of their greatest master.

[Illustration:  EUGENE FIELD’S MOTHER. From a daguerreotype taken a year or two before his birth.]