Two years after his graduation, and when only seventeen years of age, Eugene Field’s father was sufficiently learned in the law to be admitted to the bar of Vermont.  They wasted no time in those good old days.  Before he was thirty, Roswell M. Field had represented his native town in the General Assembly, had been elected several times State’s Attorney, and in every way seemed destined to play a notable part in the affairs of Vermont, if not on a broader field.  He was not only a lawyer of full and exact learning, an ingenious pleader, and a powerful advocate, but an exceptionally accomplished scholar.  His knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German rendered their literature a perennial source upon which to draw for the illumination and embellishment of the pure and virile English of which he was master.  It was from him that Eugene inherited his delight in queer and rare objects of vertu and that “rich, strong, musical and sympathetic voice” which would have been invaluable on the stage, and of which he made such captivating use among his friends.  Would that he had also inherited that “strong and athletic” frame which, according to his aged preceptor, enabled Roswell M. Field to graduate at the age of fifteen.  It is not, however, for his learning and accomplishments of mind and person that we are interested in Roswell Martin Field, but for the strange incident in his life that uprooted him from the congenial environments of New England and the career opening so temptingly before him, to transplant him to Missouri, there to become the father of a youth, who, by all laws of heredity and by the peculiar tang of his genius, should have been born and nurtured amid the stern scenes and fixed customs of Puritan New England.  That story must be told in another chapter.

CHAPTER II

HIS FATHER’S FIRST LOVE-AFFAIR

Many a time and oft in our walks and talks has Eugene Field told me the story I am about to relate, but never with the particularity of detail and the authority of absolute data with which I have “comprehended it,” as he would say, in the following pages.  It was his wish that it should be told, and I follow his injunction the more readily, as in its relation I am able to demonstrate how clearly the son inherited his peculiar literary mode from the father.

It may be said further that, had the remarkable situation which grew out of Roswell M. Field’s first marriage occurred one hundred years earlier, or had it occurred in our own day in a state like Kentucky, it would have provoked a feud that could only have been settled by blood, while it might readily have imbrued whole counties.  Even in Vermont it stirred up animosities which occupied the attention of the courts for years, and which the lapse of nearly two generations has not wholly eradicated from the memory of old inhabitants.  In the opening remarks of the opinion of the Supreme Court, in one of several cases growing out of it,