It was rank disloyalty to the memory of “Dooley” to rename the bench-legged fyce “Sooner” and locate the scene of his “chronic repose” in St. Jo rather than under the flea-proof tree of Mrs. Emerson in Amherst.  But who regrets the poetic license as he reads: 

We all hev our choice, an’ you like the rest, Allow that dorg which you’ve got is the best; I wouldn’t give much for the boy ’at grows up With no friendship subsistin’ ’tween him and a pup; When a fellow gits old—­I tell you it’s nice To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce!

Although Eugene Field never forgot or forgave the terrors of the New England Sabbath, its strict observance, its bad singing, doleful prayers and interminable sermons, the impress of those all-day sessions in church and Sunday-school was never eradicated from his life and writings.  Nothing else influenced his work or affected his style as much as the morals and the literature of the Bible and the sacred songs that were lined out week after week from the pulpit under which he literally and figuratively sat when a youth.  “If,” he has said, “I could be grateful to New England for nothing else I should bless her forevermore for pounding me with the Bible and the Spelling-Book.”

There is in the possession of the family the “Notes of a Sermon by E.P.  Field,” said to have been written by Eugene at the age of nine, when he affected the middle initial of P in honor of Wendell Phillips.  It was more probably written when he was twelve or fourteen, as he showed at nine none of the signs of precocity which such a composition indicates.  The youthful Channing took for his text the fifteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of Proverbs:  “Good understanding giveth favor:  but the way of transgressors is hard.”  Upon this he expounded as follows: 

  “The life of a Christian is often compared to a race that is hard
  and to a battle in which a man must fight hard to win, these
  comparisons have prevented many from becoming Christians.

“But the Bible does not compare the Christian’s path as one of hard labor.  But Solomon says wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness and her paths are peace.  Under the word transgressor are included all those that disobey their maker, or, in shorter words, the ungodly.  Every person looking around him will see many who are transgressors and whose lot is very hard.

“I remark secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of guilt his conscience smites him.  The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to the beholder.  Sometimes, however, he will be stayed in his guilt.  A death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave.  Then for a little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but before long he returns to his worldly lusts.  Oh, it is indeed