From personal inquiry at Williamstown I find that none of the professors at Williams saw an encouraging gleam of aptitude for anything in the big-eyed, shambling youth whom Mr. Tufts had assiduously coached to meet the requirements of matriculation.  There is a shadowy tradition that he did fairly well in his Latin themes when the subject suited his fancy, but his fancy more often led him to a sporting resort, kept by an ex-pugilist named Pettit, where he took a hand in billiards and made awkward essays with the boxing-gloves.  Of course there is the inevitable yarn of a college town that he became so conceited over his skill in the manly art that he ventured to “stand up” before Pettit, to the bloody disfigurement of his countenance and the humiliation of his pride.  If this is true, the lesson lasted him all his life, for a less combative adult than Eugene Field never graduated from an American college.  He had a physical as well as a moral antipathy to personal participation in anything involving bodily danger or violence.

Even then Field possessed the wit and the plentiful lack of reverence for the conventionalities of life that must have rendered him both intolerable and incomprehensible to a body of serious-minded and necessarily conventional professors.  The very traits that subsequently made him the most entertaining comrade in the world provoked only consternation and uneasiness at Williams.  This eventually led President Hopkins to inform Mr. Tufts privately that it might be well for his pupil, as certainly it would conduce to the orderly life of Williamstown, if he would run up from Monson and persuade Eugene to return home with him.  There was no dismissal, rustication, or official reprimand of Eugene Field by the ever-honored President Hopkins.  Field simply faded out of the annals and class of 1872, as if he had never been entered at Williams.

Memories of Eugene Field are not as thick at Williamstown as blackberries on the Pelham hills.  President Carter does not cherish them kindly because, perhaps, on the occasion of his appointment, Field gravely discussed his qualifications for the chair once occupied by Mark Hopkins as resting upon his contribution of “a small but active pellet” to the pharmaceutical equipment of his countrymen, famed for its efficacy to cure all disorders of mind and body “while you sleep.”

“Hy.”  Walden, much in demand as an expressman, remembers Field as a somewhat reckless fellow and “dare-devil,” and is authority for the story of Field’s discomfiture in the boxing bout with the redoubtable Pettit.

Old Tom McMahon, who has been a familiar character to the students of Williams for nearly two generations, has a hazy recollection of the eccentric Eugene who flitted across the college campus a third of a century ago.  He says that, if he “remembers right, Mr. Field was not one of the gentlemen who cared much for his clothes,” but he “guessed he was made careless like, and in some ways he was a fine young man.”