hard for a sinner to go down into perhaps perdition over all the obstacles which God has placed in his path.  But many, I am afraid, do go down into perdition, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in after it.

“Suppose now there was a fearful precipice and to allure you there your enemies should scatter flowers on its dreadful edge, would you if you knew that while you were strolling about on that awful rock that night would settle down on you and that you would fall from that giddy, giddy height, would you, I say, go near that dreadful rock?  Just so with the transgressor, he falls from that height just because he wishes to appear good in the sight of the world.  But what will a man gain if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.”

Whenever this was written it shows on its face that it is more an effort of memory or the effect of one of the fearful sermons of fifty years ago on the impressionable mind of youth, than the original production of a precocious boy struggling with the insoluble problem of life and judgment to come.  Mark how the stock words of the pulpiteer, “transgressor,” “worldly lusts,” “dreadful,” “awful,” “perdition” stalk fiercely through the sermon of the youthful saint or sinner!

Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer.  But Eugene’s drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came to his attention.

In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England.  One view was tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under discussion in the public press.  It is illustrated in the following paragraph: 

The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission.  This may be true.  At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce.  She has no commerce of her own, and she probably never will have.  There is a bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of mention.  There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports, but we have noticed that all the “genuine Vermont maple-sugar” in the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent as the heel of a gum-boot.  In all the State of Vermont there is but one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout’s Corner,