[Illustration:  WILLIAMS COLLEGE BUILDINGS, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.]

The most valuable glimpse of Field at Williams is contained in the following letter written by Solomon B. Griffin, the managing editor of the Springfield Republican for many years, with whom I have had some correspondence in respect to the matter referred to therein.  He not only knew Field at Williamstown, but was one of his life-long friends and warmest admirers.  After a few introductory words, under date of Springfield, February 4th, 1901, Mr. Griffin wrote: 

Yes, I was of the class of 1872, but Field flitted before I became connected with it.  But Williamstown was my birthplace and home and I struck up an acquaintance with him at Smith’s college bookstore and the post-office.  Field was raw and not a bit deferential to established customs, and so the secret-society men were not attracted to him.  The “trotting” or preliminary attentions to freshmen constitute a great and revered feature of college life.  When I saw Field “trotting” a lank and gawky freshman for the “Mills Theological Society,” the humor of it appealed to one soaked in the traditions of a college town, and we “became acquainted.”  Field left the class about as I came in.

It is not remarkable that Tom McMahon has no clear recollection of Field, who was in college only about six months and was not a fraternity man.  There are so many coming and going!  Nor that the faculty should be mindful of the lawless, irresponsible boy, and not of the genius that developed on its own lines and was never conventionalized but always remained a sinner however brilliant, and a flayer of good men unblessed with a saving sense of humor.  If there is any kind thought for me in my old home it is because I did what Field couldn’t do, paid outward respect to the environment.  It was possible for me to see his point of view and theirs—­to them irreconcilable, and to him also.

  Sincerely yours,

  S.B.  GRIFFIN.

Mr. Tufts’s memorandum-book shows that Eugene returned to Monson April 27th, 1889, so his experience, if not his education, at Williams covered almost eight months of an impressionable period of his life.  It is interesting to record the comment of Mrs. Tufts on the return of the wanderer to her indulgent care.  “He was too smart for the professors at Williams,” said she; “because they did not understand him, they could not pardon his eccentricities.”  That she did understand her husband’s favorite pupil is evidenced in the following brief description, given off-hand to the writer:  “Eugene was not much of a student, but very much of an irrepressible boy.  There was no malice in his pranks, only the inherited disposition to tease somebody and everybody.”

On July 5th, 1869, Eugene was summoned to St. Louis by the serious illness of his father, who died July 12th.

Thus ended his education, so far as it was to be affected by the environments and instructors of New England.  Thenceforth he was destined to be a western man, with an ineradicable tang of Puritan prejudices and convictions cropping out unexpectedly and incongruously in all he thought and wrote.