n 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