rly 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