and that to the boiler-shop belongs the honor of having heard the first lullabies that greeted the ears of their greatest master.
Roswell's view receives negative corroboration from the testimony of Mrs. Temperance Moon, of Farmington, Utah, who for a time lived in their father's family. Under date of February 25th, 1901, Mrs. Moon wrote to me:
"I can give you very little information in regard to Mr. Field's place of birth. It was on Third Street. I do not remember the names of the cross streets, I think Cherry was one. Eugene was four months old when I went to live with them. I stayed until the family went east for the summer. Mrs. Field's sister was living with them. Her name was Miss Arabella Reed. When they came back Roswell was a few months old. They went to live on Fifth Street in a three-story house. Mrs. Field sent word for me to come and take care of Eugene. I was twelve years old. She gave me full charge of him. I was very proud of the charge. He was a noble child. I loved him as a dear brother. He took great delight in hearing me read any kind of children's stories and fairy tales. His mother was a lovely woman. I have a book and a picture Eugene sent to me. The picture is of him and his mother when he was only six months old."
Equal and illusive doubt hangs over the date of Eugene Field's birth. Was it September 2d or 3d, 1850? In his "Auto-Analysis," of which we shall hear more further along, Field himself gives preference to the latter figure. But as his preference more than half the time went by the rule of contraries, that would be prima-facie evidence that he was born on the earlier date. There again the testimony of the younger brother is to the effect that in their youth the anniversary of Eugene's birth was held to be September 2d. Their father said he could not reconcile his mind to the thought that one of his children was born on so memorable an anniversary as September 3d, the day of Cromwell's death. I have little doubt that Field himself fostered the irrepressible conflict of dates, on the theory that two birthdays a year afforded a double opportunity to playfully remind his friends of the pleasing duty of an interchange of tokens on such anniversaries. If they forgot September 2d, he could jog their memories that Cromwell's death on September 3d, two centuries before, was no excuse for ignoring his birth on September 3d, 1850.
Whether born on the anniversary of Cromwell's death or in the boiler-shop, no stories of the youthful precocity of Eugene Field survive to entertain us or to suggest that he gave early indication of the possession either of unusual talent or of that unique personality that were to distinguish him from the thousands born every day.
But Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were not long to know the watchful tenderness and ambitious solicitude of that "mother love" of which the elder has so sweetly sung. In November, 1856, when Eugene was six years old, their mother died and their father's thoughts instinctively turned to his sister, hoping to find with her, amid scenes familiar to his own youth, a home and affectionate care for his motherless boys. How the early loss of his mother affected the life of Eugene Field it is impossible to tell. Not until the boy of six whom she left had become a man of forty did he attempt to pay a tribute of filial love to her memory. The following lines, under the simple title, "To My Mother," first appeared in his "Sharps and Flats" column, October 25th, 1890. It was reprinted in his "Second Book of Verse." The opening lines summon up a tender picture of a "grace that is dead":
How fair you are, my mother!
Ah, though 'tis many a year
Since you were here,
Still do I see your beauteous face
And with the glow
Of your dark eyes cometh a grace
Of long ago.
The Mistress French of our earlier acquaintance, who was a widow when we last knew her in Newfane, had married again and, as Mistress Thomas Jones, had moved with her daughter, Mary Field French, to Amherst, Mass. To the home of Mrs. Jones and the loving care of Miss French, Eugene and Roswell, Jr., were entrusted. Miss French was at this time a young woman, a spinster—Eugene delighted to call her—of about thirty years. His old Munson tutor thus describes her:
"Mary Field French, a daughter of Mrs. Jones by her first husband, was a lady of strong mind, and much culture, with a sound judgment and decision of character and very gracious manners. She was always sociable and agreeable and so admirably adapted to the charge of the two brothers." They retained through manhood the warmest affection for this cousin-mother, and never wearied in showing toward her the grateful devotion of loyal sons.
"Here," continues Dr. Tufts, "in this charming home, under the best of New England influences and religious instruction, with nothing harsh or repulsive, the boys could not have found a more congenial home. Indeed, few mothers are able or even capable of doing so much for their own children as Miss French did for these two brothers, watching over them incessantly, yet not spoiling them by weak indulgence or repelling them by harsh discipline."
Here it was that Eugene was brought up in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord," as he would often declare with a mock severity of tone, that left a mixed impression as to the beneficence of the nurture and the abiding quality of the admonition. Here he spent his school days, not in acquiring a broad or deep basis for future scholarship, but in studying the ways and whims of womankind, in practising the subtile arts whereby the boy of from six to fifteen attains a tyrannous mastery over the hearts of a feminine household, and in securing the leadership among the daring spirits of his own age and sex, for whom he was early able to furnish a continuous programme of entertainment, adventure, and mischief.
Of this period of Eugene Field's life we get the truest glimpse through the eyes of his brother, who has written appreciatively of their boyhood spent in Amherst. "His boyhood," writes Roswell, "was similar to that of other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is yet characteristic of many New England families."
If the reader wishes to know more of the New England atmosphere, in which Eugene Field was permitted to have pretty much his own sweet way by his cousin and aunt, let him have recourse to Mrs. Earle's "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," which I find in my library commended to my perusal, "with Eugene Field's love, December 25th, 1891"—and to other books by the same author. In a letter to Mrs. Earle, from which I quoted in the opening paragraph of this narrative, I find the following reference to the period of his life which we are now considering:
"Fourteen years of my life were spent in Newfane, Vt., and Amherst, Mass. My lovely old grandmother was one of the very elect. How many times have I carried her footstove for her and filled it in the vestry-room. I have frozen in the old pew while grandma kept nice and warm and nibbled lozenges and cassia cakes during meeting. I remember the old sounding-board. There was no melodeon in that meeting-house; and the leader of the choir pitched the tune with a tuning-fork. As a boy I used to play hi-spy in the horse-shed. But I am not so very old—no, a man is still a boy at forty, isn't he?"
Eugene Field would have been a boy at fifty and at eighty had he lived, and he was very much of a boy at the period of which he wrote to Mrs. Earle. I have no doubt that he was a very circumspect lad while under the loving yet stern glance of that dear old grandmother, in whose kindly yet dignified presence three generations of Fields moved with varying emotions of love and circumspection. "Her husband" (General Martin Field of our acquaintance), wrote "Uncle
