g 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.

In the autumn of 1869 Eugene entered the sophomore class at Knox
College, Galesburg, Ill., where Professor John William Burgess, who
had been chosen as his guardian, held the chair of logic, rhetoric,
English literature, and political science. But his career at Knox was
practically a repetition of that at Williams. He chafed under the
restraint of set rules and the requirement of attention to studies
in which he took no interest. If he had been allowed to choose, he
would have devoted his time to reading the Latin classics and
declaiming--that is, as much time as he could spare from plaguing
the professors and interrupting the studies of his companions by
every device of a festive and fertile imagination.

One year of this was enough for the faculty of Knox and for the
restless scholar, so in the autumn of 1870 Eugene joined his brother
Roswell in the junior class at the University of Missouri. Here Eugene
Field ended, without graduating, such education as the school and the
university was ever to give him, for in the spring of 1871 he left
Columbia for St. Louis, never to return--a student at three
universities and a graduate from none.

Of Eugene Field's life in Columbia many stories abound there and
throughout Missouri. From the aged and honored historian of the
university I have the following testimony as to the relations of the
two brothers with that institution, premising it with the fact that all
the official records of students were consumed in the fire that visited
the univer