land meeting-houses, but deserted by its
congregation of Baptists, which had dwindled to the vanishing point.
In the centre of the village green is a grove of noble elms under
whose grateful shade, on the day of my visit to Newfane, I saw a
quartette of gray-headed attorneys, playing quoits with horse-shoes.
They had come up from Brattleboro to try a case, which had suffered
the usual "law's delay" of a continuance, and were whiling away the
hours in the bucolic sport of their ancestors, while the idle
villagers enjoyed their unpractised awkwardness. They all boasted how
they could ring the peg when they were boys.

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.