"was genial and social, full of humor and mirth, oftentimes filling the house with his jocund laugh." She, however, "true to her refined womanly instinct, her sense of propriety, rarely disturbed by his merry and harmless jests, with great discretion pursued 'the even tenor of her way.' Patiently and with unfaltering devotion to the higher and nobler purposes of life, she always maintained her self-possession, strenuously avoided all levity and frivolity, rarely relaxed the gravity of her deportment, and never failed in the end of controlling both husband and household."
Eugene's own picture of his grandmother is contained in the following passage in an article contributed by him to the Ladies' Home Journal:
"Grandma was a pillar in the Congregational Church. At the decline and disintegration of the Universalist society, she rejoiced cordially as if a temple of Baal or an idol of Ashtaroth had been overturned. Yes, grandma was Puritanical—not to the extent of persecution, but a Puritan in the severity of her faith and in the exacting nicety of her interpretation of her duties to God and mankind. Grandma's Sunday began at six o'clock Saturday evening; by that hour her house was swept and garnished, and her lamps trimmed, every preparation made for a quiet, reverential observance of the Sabbath Day. There was no cooking on Sunday. At noon Mrs. Deacon Ranney and other old ladies used to come from church with grandma to eat luncheon and discuss the sermon and suggest deeds of piety for the ensuing week. I remember Mrs. Deacon Ranney and her frigid companions very distinctly. They never smiled and they wore austere bombazines that rustled and squeaked dolorously. Mrs. Deacon Ranney seldom noticed me further than to regard me with a look that seemed to stigmatize me as an incipient vessel of wrath that was not to be approved of, and I never liked Mrs. Deacon Ranney after I heard her reminding grandma one day that Solomon had truly said, 'spare the rod and spoil the child.' I still think ill of Mrs. Deacon Ranney for having sought to corrupt dear old grandma's gentle nature with any such incendiary suggestions. The meeting-house was cold and draughty, and the seats, with their straight backs, were oh, so hard. Grandma's pew was near the pulpit. I remember now how ashamed I used to be to carry her footstove all the way up that long aisle for her—I was such a foolish little boy then—and now, ah me, how ready and glad and proud I should be to do that service for dear old grandma!
"When grandma went to meeting she carried a lovely big black velvet bag; it had a bouquet wrought in beads of subdued color upon it, and it hung by two sombre silk puckering ribbons over grandma's arm. In the bag grandma carried a supply of crackers and peppermint lozenges, and upon these she would nibble in meeting whenever she felt that feeling of goneness in the pit of her stomach, which I was told old ladies sometimes suffer with. It was proper enough, I was assured, for old ladies to nibble at crackers and peppermint lozenges in meeting, but that such a proceeding would be very wicked for a little boy."
From which it might appear that the atmosphere of Newfane, under the grave and serious deportment of his grandmother, must have been a change from the freedom Eugene and his brother enjoyed under the fond rule of Miss French at Amherst. But when I was in Newfane in 1899 I was informed by a dear old lady in bombazine, who remembered their visits distinctly, that "Eugene and Roswell were wild boys. Not bad, but just tew full of old Nick for anything."
It was in Amherst, however, and not in Newfane, from Cousin Mary, and not from his dear Grandmother Esther, that Eugene got the New England "bent" in his Missouri mind. It is hard to separate the fact from the fancy in his story of "My Grandmother." His youth from 1856 to 1865 was lived in Amherst. His only visit to the Field homestead in Newfane was when he was nine years old. And of this he has written, "we stayed there seven months and the old lady got all the grandsons she wanted. She did not invite us to repeat the visit." He also confessed that all his love for nature dated from that visit. As a boy he would never have been permitted to indulge the fondness for animal pets under "the dark penetrating eyes" of his grandmother, that was tolerated and became a life-habit by the "gracious love" of Mary Field French. Of this fondness for pets, Roswell has written that it amounted to a passion. "But unlike other boys he seemed to carry his pets into a higher sphere and to give them personality. For each pet, whether dog, cat, bird, goat, or squirrel—he had the family distrust of a horse—he not only had a name, but it was his delight to fancy that each possessed a peculiar dialect of human speech, and each he addressed in the humorous manner conceived. When in childhood he was conducting a poultry annex to the homestead, each chicken was properly instructed to respond to a peculiar call, and Finniken, Minniken, Winniken, Dump, Poog, Boog seemed to recognize immediately the queer intonations of their master with an intelligence that is not usually accorded to chickens."
I cannot forbear to introduce here a characteristic bit of evidence from Eugene Field's own pen of the survival of the passion for pets to which his brother testifies:
"It is only under stress," said he in his allotted column in the Chicago Record of January 9th, 1892, "nay, under distress, that the mysterious veil of the editorial-room may properly be thrown aside and the secret thereof disclosed. It is under a certain grievous distress that we make this statement now:
"For a number of months the silent partner in the construction of this sporadic column of 'Sharps and Flats' has been a little fox terrier given to the writer hereof by his friend, Mr. Will J. Davis. We named our little companion Jessie, and our attachment to her was wholly reciprocated by Jessie herself, although (and we make this confession very shamefacedly) our enthusiasm for Jessie was by no means shared by the prudent housewife in charge of the writer's domestic affairs. Jessie contributed to and participated in our work in this wise: She would sit and admiringly watch the writer at his work, wagging her abridged tail cordially whenever he bestowed a casual glance upon her, threatening violence to every intruder, warning her master of the approach of every garrulous visitor, and oftentimes, when she felt lonely, insisted on climbing up into her master's lap and slumbering there while he wrote and wrote away. We have tried our poems on Jessie, and she always liked them; leastwise she always wagged her tail approvingly and smiled her flatteries as only a very intelligent little dog can. Some folk think that our poetry drove Jessie away from home, but we know better; Jessie herself would deny that malicious imputation were she here now and could she speak.
"To this little companion we became strongly, perhaps foolishly, attached. She walked with us by day, hunting rats and playing famously every variety of intelligent antics. Whither we went she went, and at night she shared our couch with us. Though only nine months old Jessie stole into this life of ours so very far that years seemed hardly to compass the period and honesty of our friendship.
"Well, last Tuesday night Jessie disappeared—vanished as mysteriously as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her. She had been playing with a discreet dog friend in Fullerton Avenue, and that was the last seen of her! Where can she have gone? It is very lonesome without Jessie. Moreover there are poems to be read for her approval before they can be printed; the great cause of literature waits upon Jessie. She must be found and restored to her proper sphere.
"Jessie perhaps was not beautiful, yet she was fair to her master's eyes. She was white with yellow ears and a brownish blaze over her left eye and warty cheek. She weighed perhaps twenty pounds (for Jessie never had dyspepsia), and one mark you surely could tell her by was the absence of a nail from her left forepaw, the honorable penalty of an encounter with an enraged setting hen in our barn last month.
"Jessie's master is not rich, for the poetry that fox terriers approve is not remunerative; but that master has accumulated (by means of industrious application to his work and his friends) the sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child who will bring Jessie back again. For he is a weak human creature, is Jessie's master, in his loneliness, without his faithful, admiring little dumb friend."
Two days later Field printed the following letter and his answer thereto, both written by the same hand in his column:
CHICAGO, January 10th.
To
