Field were not realized in the eternal perdition of
his two sons. Education did not prove their destruction. With more
than respectable talents Charles was reinstated at Middlebury, and
four months later graduated with high honors, while Roswell took his
degree when only fifteen years old, the plague and admiration of his
preceptors, and, we may well suppose, the pride and joy of the
agonized parents, who welcomed the graduates to Newfane with all the
profusion of a prodigal father and the love of a distracted but doting
mother. They never had any reason to doubt the nature of sister Mary's
reception.

Charles and Roswell studied law with their father in the quaint little
office detached from the Field homestead at Newfane. The word edifice
might fittingly be applied to this building which, though only one
room square and one story high, has a front on the public square,
with miniature Greek columns to distinguish it from the ordinary
outbuildings that are such characteristic appendages of New England
houses. The troubles of General Field with his two sons were not to
end when he got them away from the temptations of college life, for
they were prone to mischief, "and that continually," even under his
severe and watchful eye. This took one particular form which is the
talk of Windham County even yet. By reason of their presence in
General Field's office they were early apprised of actions at law
which he was retained to institute; whereupon they sought out the
defendant and offered their services to represent him gratis. Thus
the elder counsellor frequently found himself pitted in the justice's
courts against his keen-witted and graceless sons, who availed
themselves of every obsolete technicality, quirk, and precedent of
the law to obstruct justice and worry their dignified parent, whom
they addressed as "our learned but erring brother in the law." Not
infrequently these youthful practitioners triumphed in these legal
tilts, to the mortification of their father, who, in his indignation,
could not conceal his admiration for the ingenuity of their
misdirected professional zeal.

[Illustration: ESTHER S. FIELD.
_Eugene Field's Grandmother._]

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 tow