Edsall, being a lawyer with a special interest in real estate, could tell me many of the known facts about the Clark property over which there had been some curious litigation. So the story grew that evening over our dinner, to be filled in later by many details that came to me unexpectedly,--I suppose because I was interested in the fate of Clark's Field. I The Clarks, as their name implies, were of common English blood, originally of some clerkly tribe and so possessing no distinctive patronymic. These Clarks were ordinary Yankee farmers, who had been settled in one place for upwards of two hundred years. Very likely some ancestor of my old Samuel Clark had stood at Concord with "the embattled farmers." I know not. He easily could have done so, for Alton was not many miles distant from the battle field. But little either spiritual or militant fervor from these Puritan ancestors seems to have come down to Samuel, who in 1860 occupied the family farm of one hundred and forty acres, "more or less," according to the loose description of old deeds. Samuel, indeed, had not enough patriotism to sympathize with his son, John Parsons, who finally ran off to the war, as so many boys did, to escape the monotony of farm life. For Samuel, his father, was a plain, ordinary, selfish, and not very thrifty New England farmer, who laid down his fields every year to the same crops of oats and rye and hay, kept a few sheep and hogs and cows, and in the easy, shiftless way of his kind drained the soil of his old farm, with the narrow consolation that it would somehow last his time. So little ambition he had that shortly after his son went to the war, thus depriving him of free labor, he "retired" from his farm,--that is, he sold what he could of its fields and pastures and bought himself a house on Church Street near the Square in Alton, probably the same house where I was taken for my one interview with him. What he did not sell of the farm he rented to another more energetic farmer, one Everitt Adams, the old market-gardener whom I remembered. Adams with more thrift and the great incentive of necessity built hothouses and went in for market-gardening to supply the wants of the neighboring city, which was already making itself felt upon the surrounding country. Hence the long rows of celery, cabbage, lettuce, and peas that I remember across my father's back fence. All the near-by farmers were doing much the same thing, turning the better part of their land into gardens. They would start before dawn in summer time for the city, making their way along the South Road, which was the main thoroughfare into this part of the country. Many a time have I seen their covered wagons returning from the city about the time when I was starting for school, the horses wearily plodding along at a walk, the farmer or his boy asleep in the wagon on his empty crates.