Here it was that Eugene was brought up in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord,” as he would often declare with a mock severity of tone, that left a mixed impression as to the beneficence of the nurture and the abiding quality of the admonition.  Here he spent his school days, not in acquiring a broad or deep basis for future scholarship, but in studying the ways and whims of womankind, in practising the subtile arts whereby the boy of from six to fifteen attains a tyrannous mastery over the hearts of a feminine household, and in securing the leadership among the daring spirits of his own age and sex, for whom he was early able to furnish a continuous programme of entertainment, adventure, and mischief.

Of this period of Eugene Field’s life we get the truest glimpse through the eyes of his brother, who has written appreciatively of their boyhood spent in Amherst.  “His boyhood,” writes Roswell, “was similar to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings 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