Hither General Martin Field brought the young, and, as surviving portraits testify, beautiful Mistress Kellogg to be his wife.  Here to them were born “them Field boys,” Charles K. (April 24th, 1803) and Roswell M. (February 22d, 1807), destined to be thorns in their father’s flesh throughout their school-days, his opponents in every justice’s court where they could volunteer to match their wits against his, and, in the person of Roswell Martin, to be the distraction and despair of the courts of Windsor County and Vermont, until a decision of the Supreme Court so outraged that son’s sense of the sacredness of the marriage vow, that he shook the granite dust of Vermont from his feet, and turned his face to the west, where he became the original counsel in the Dred Scott case, married and had sons of his own.

[Illustration:  GENERAL MARTIN FIELD. Eugene Field’s Grandfather.]

But before taking up the thread of Roswell Martin Field’s strange and unique story, let me give a letter written by his father to his sister, Miss Mary Field, then at the school of Miss Emma Willard in Troy, N.Y., as exhibit number one, that Eugene Field came by his peculiarities, literary and otherwise, by direct lineal descent.  Roswell was a phenomenal scholar, as his own eldest son was not.  At the age of eleven he was ready for college, and entered Middlebury with his brother Charles, his senior by four years.  How they conducted themselves there may be judged from this letter to their sister: 

  Newfane, March 31st, 1822.

  Dear Mary: 

I sit down to write you my last letter while you remain at Troy.  Yours by Mr. Read was received, in which I find you allude to the “severe and satyrical language” of mine in a former letter.  That letter was written upon the conduct of my children, which is an important subject to me.  If children are disobedient, a parent has a right to be severe with them.  If I recollect right I expressed to you that your two oldest brothers’ conduct was very reprehensible, and I there predicted their ruin.  But I then little thought that I should soon witness the sad consequences of their ill-conduct.  I received a letter from President Bates about two weeks since and another from Charles the same day, that Charles had been turned away and forever dismissed from the college for his misconduct; Roswell must suffer a public admonition and perhaps more punishment for his evil deeds.  Charles was turned out of college the 7th of March, and I wrote on the week after to have him come directly home, but we have heard nothing from him since.  Where he is we can form no conjecture.  But probably he is five hundred miles distant without money and without friends.  I leave you to conjecture the rest.  Roswell is left alone at the age of fifteen to get along, if he is permitted to stay through college.

These, Mary, are the consequences of dissipation and bad conduct.  And seeing as I do the temper