There was more truth than epigrammatic novelty in Eugene Field’s declaration that his education began when he fancied he had left it off for the serious business of life.  Throughout his boyhood he was far from a hardy youth.  He always gave the impression of having overgrown his strength, so that delicate health, and not indisposition to study, has been assigned as the excuse for his backwardness in “book larnin’” when it was decided to send him away from the congenial distractions of Amherst to the care of the Rev. James Tufts of Monson.

Monson is a very prettily situated Massachusetts town, about fifteen miles, as the crow flies, east of Springfield, and not more than twenty-five miles south by east of Amherst.  It boasted then and still boasts one of the best equipped boys’ academies in New England.  It was not to the tender mercies of this academy, however, that Eugene was entrusted, but to the private tutorship of Mr. Tufts, whose life and character justify the tribute of Roswell Field that he is “one of those noble instructors of the blessed old school who are passing away from the arena of education in America.”  He is now, in 1901, in his ninetieth year, and is always spoken of among his neighbors as the “grand old man of Monson.”  From his own lips, accompanied by the lively comments of Mrs. Tufts, and from a loving communication written by him to the Springfield Republican shortly after Eugene Field’s death I have gleaned the general facts of Eugene Field’s school-days at Monson.

[Illustration:  A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF MONSON, MASS.]

It was in the Fall of 1865 that Eugene became one of a class of six boys in the private school of Mr. Tufts.  This school was chosen because Mr. Tufts had known the boy’s parents and grandparents and felt a real interest in the lad.  He would not have received the proper care at a large school, where “he would be likely to get into trouble with his love of fun and mischief.”  The house in which Eugene became as one of the family is situated about a mile from the village and faces the post road, on the farther side of which is a mill-pond, where both Eugene and Roswell came near making the writing of this memoir unnecessary by going over the dam in a rude boat of their own construction.  Happily the experience resulted in nothing more serious than a thorough fright and a still more thorough ducking.

Back of the Tufts homestead rise some beautifully wooded hills, where Field and his schoolmates sought refuge from the gentle wrath of Mr. Tufts over their not infrequent delinquencies.  The story is told in Monson that the boys, under the leadership of Field, built a “moated castle” of tree-trunks and brushwood in a well-nigh inaccessible part of these woods.  Thence they sallied forth on their imaginary forays and thither they retired when in disgrace with Mr. Tufts.  Around this retreat they dug a deep trench, which they covered artfully with boughs and dead leaves.  Then they beguiled