Roswell Field says that his brother without instruction early acquired the habit of drawing amusing pictures of his playmates and his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came to his attention. In after life Eugene Field gave frequent proof that he cherished contradictory sentiments toward Vermont and New England. One view was tinged, I think, with the recollection of the wrong his father suffered at the hands of the Green Mountain courts, and reflects the general tenor of his comment whenever Vermont men or affairs came under discussion in the public press. It is illustrated in the following paragraph: The Vermont papers agreed that Colonel Aldace Walker is the very best man in Vermont for the Inter-State Commerce Commission. This may be true. At the same time, however, we fail to see what interest Vermont can possibly take in inter-state commerce. She has no commerce of her own, and she probably never will have. There is a bobbin factory at Williamsville, and a melodeon factory at Brattleboro, but the commerce resulting from them is not worthy of mention. There is talk about the maple-sugar that Vermont exports, but we have noticed that all the "genuine Vermont maple-sugar" in the Western market comes from the South, and is about as succulent as the heel of a gum-boot. In all the State of Vermont there is but one railroad, the Vermont Central; it begins at Grout's Corner, Mass., and runs in a bee-line north until it reaches the southern end of the Montreal bridge. This remarkable road has a so-called branch operating once per week between White River Junction and Montpelier, and a triweekly branch extending to Burlington. Montpelier is the home of Hiram Atkins, the famous "Nestor uv Checkerberry Journalism," and White River Junction is the whistling station and water-tank from which our country gets its election returns every four years. Burlington is located on Lake Champlain, and contains the summer residence of that grand old survivor of the glacial period, George F. Edmunds. Thus in a brief paragraph have we compressed all that can be said of the commerce and the railways of Vermont. The other view is softened with the haze that hangs over the scenes of childhood in the minds of all men of feeling when interpreted by an artist in expressing the thought "that unbidden rises and passes in a tear." It is from Field's little-known memorial to Mrs. Melvin L. Gray, written while he was in Southern California: