How so devoted a child of all that is queer and contradictory in New
England character came to be born in "Poor old Mizzoorah," as he so
often wrote it, is in itself a rare romance, which I propose to tell
as the key to the life and works of Eugene Field. Part of it is told
in the reports of the Supreme Court of Vermont, part in the most
remarkable special pleas ever permitted in a chancery suit in America,
and the best part still lingers in the memory of the good people of
Newfane and Brattleboro, Vt., where "them Field boys" are still
referred to as unaccountable creatures, full of odd conceits, "an'
dredful sot when once they took a notion."

"Them Field boys" were not Eugene and his brother Roswell Martin
Field, the joint authors of translations from Horace, known as "Echoes
from the Sabine Farm," but their father, Roswell Martin, and their
uncle, Charles Kellogg, Field of Newfane aforesaid.

These two Fields were the sons of General Martin Field, who was born
in Leverett, Mass., February 12th, 1773, and of his wife, Esther Smith
Kellogg, who was the grandmother celebrated in more than one of Eugene
Field's stories and poems. Through both sides of the houses of Field
and Kellogg the pedigree of Eugene can be traced back to the first
settlers of New England. But there is no need to go back of the second
generation to find and identify the seed whence sprang the strangely
interesting subject of this study.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, as now, Newfane, then
Fayetteville, was a typical county seat. This pretty New England
village, which celebrated the centennial of its organization as a town
in 1874, is situated on the West River, some twelve miles from
Brattleboro, at which point that noisy stream joins the more sedate