“Them Field boys” were not Eugene and his brother Roswell Martin Field, the joint authors of translations from Horace, known as “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,” but their father, Roswell Martin, and their uncle, Charles Kellogg, Field of Newfane aforesaid.

These two Fields were the sons of General Martin Field, who was born in Leverett, Mass., February 12th, 1773, and of his wife, Esther Smith Kellogg, who was the grandmother celebrated in more than one of Eugene Field’s stories and poems.  Through both sides of the houses of Field and Kellogg the pedigree of Eugene can be traced back to the first settlers of New England.  But there is no need to go back of the second generation to find and identify the seed whence sprang the strangely interesting subject of this study.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, as now, Newfane, then Fayetteville, was a typical county seat.  This pretty New England village, which celebrated the centennial of its organization as a town in 1874, is situated on the West River, some twelve miles from Brattleboro, at which point that noisy stream joins the more sedate Connecticut River.  It nestles under the hills upon which, at a distance of two miles, was the site of the original town of Newfane—­not a vestige of which remains to remind the traveller that up to 1825 the shire town of Windham County overlooked as grand a panorama as ever opened up before the eye of man.  The reason for abandoning the exposed location on the hills for the sheltered nook by the river may be inferred from the descriptive adjectives.  The present town of Newfane clusters about a village square, that would have delighted the heart of Oliver Goldsmith.  The county highway bisects it.  The Windham County Hotel, with the windows of its northern end grated to prevent the escape of inmates—­signifying that its keeper is half boniface and half county jailer—­bounds it on the east, the Court House and Town Hall, separate buildings, flank it on the west.  The Newfane Hotel rambles along half of its northern side, and the Field mansion, with its front garden stretching to the road, does the same for the southern half.  In the rear, and facing the opening between the Court House and the Town Hall, stands the Congregational Church, where Eugene Field crunched caraway-seed biscuits when on a visit to his grandmother, and back of this stands another church, spotless in the white paint of Puritan New England meeting-houses, but deserted by its congregation of Baptists, which had dwindled to the vanishing point.  In the centre of the village green is a grove of noble elms under whose grateful shade, on the day of my visit to Newfane, I saw a quartette of gray-headed attorneys, playing quoits with horse-shoes.  They had come up from Brattleboro to try a case, which had suffered the usual “law’s delay” of a continuance, and were whiling away the hours in the bucolic sport of their ancestors, while the idle villagers enjoyed their unpractised awkwardness.  They all boasted how they could ring the peg when they were boys.