suffer with.  It was proper enough, I was assured, for old ladies to nibble at crackers and peppermint lozenges in meeting, but that such a proceeding would be very wicked for a little boy.”

From which it might appear that the atmosphere of Newfane, under the grave and serious deportment of his grandmother, must have been a change from the freedom Eugene and his brother enjoyed under the fond rule of Miss French at Amherst.  But when I was in Newfane in 1899 I was informed by a dear old lady in bombazine, who remembered their visits distinctly, that “Eugene and Roswell were wild boys.  Not bad, but just tew full of old Nick for anything.”

[Illustration:  THE HOMESTEAD AT AMHERST, MASS. Now owned by Mr. Hiram Eaton of New York.]

It was in Amherst, however, and not in Newfane, from Cousin Mary, and not from his dear Grandmother Esther, that Eugene got the New England “bent” in his Missouri mind.  It is hard to separate the fact from the fancy in his story of “My Grandmother.”  His youth from 1856 to 1865 was lived in Amherst.  His only visit to the Field homestead in Newfane was when he was nine years old.  And of this he has written, “we stayed there seven months and the old lady got all the grandsons she wanted.  She did not invite us to repeat the visit.”  He also confessed that all his love for nature dated from that visit.  As a boy he would never have been permitted to indulge the fondness for animal pets under “the dark penetrating eyes” of his grandmother, that was tolerated and became a life-habit by the “gracious love” of Mary Field French.  Of this fondness for pets, Roswell has written that it amounted to a passion.  “But unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher sphere and to give them personality.  For each pet, whether dog, cat, bird, goat, or squirrel—­he had the family distrust of a horse—­he not only had a name, but it was his delight to fancy that each possessed a peculiar dialect of human speech, and each he addressed in the humorous manner conceived.  When in childhood he was conducting a poultry annex to the homestead, each chicken was properly instructed to respond to a peculiar call, and Finniken, Minniken, Winniken, Dump, Poog, Boog seemed to recognize immediately the queer intonations of their master with an intelligence that is not usually accorded to chickens.”

I cannot forbear to introduce here a characteristic bit of evidence from Eugene Field’s own pen of the survival of the passion for pets to which his brother testifies: 

“It is only under stress,” said he in his allotted column in the Chicago Record of January 9th, 1892, “nay, under distress, that the mysterious veil of the editorial-room may properly be thrown aside and the secret thereof disclosed.  It is under a certain grievous distress that we make this statement now: 

“For a number of months the silent partner in the construction of this sporadic column