"Oh, we'll have to begin with your ancestry, though it's a good deal like the introductory chapter to the old-fashioned novels. We'll start early, with your birth for instance." "Well, I was born in St. Louis." [Illustration: THE OLD HOMESTEAD AT FAYETTEVILLE, VERMONT.] "Is that so?" the interviewer showed an unprofessional surprise. "Why, I thought you were born in Massachusetts?" "No," said Field, reflectively. "No, I'm sorry of course, but I was born in St. Louis; but my parents were Vermont people." He mentioned this as an extenuating circumstance, evidently. "My father was a lawyer. He was a precocious boy,--graduated from Middlebury College when he was fifteen, and when he was nineteen was made States-Attorney by special act of the legislature; without that he would have had to wait till he was twenty-one. He married and came West, and I was born in 1850." "So you're forty-three? Where does the New England life come in?" "When I was seven years old my mother died, and father packed us boys right off to Massachusetts and put us under the care of a maiden cousin, a Miss French,--she was a fine woman too." Garland looked up from his scratchpad to ask, "This was at Amherst?" "Yes. I stayed there until I was nineteen, and they were the sweetest and finest days of my life. I like old Amherst." He paused a moment, and his long face slowly lightened up. "By the way, here's something you'll like. When I was nine years old father sent us up to Fayetteville, Vermont, to the old homestead where my grandmother lived. We stayed there seven months," he said with a grim curl of his lips, "and the old lady got all the grandson she wanted. She didn't want the visit repeated." He sat a moment in silence, and his face softened and his eyes grew tender. "I tell you, Garland, a man's got to have a layer of country experience somewhere in him. My love for nature dates from that visit, because I had never lived in the country before. Sooner or later a man rots if he lives too far away from the grass and the trees." "You're right there, Field, only I didn't know you felt it so deeply. I supposed you hated farm life." "I do, but farm life is not nature. I'd like to live in the country without the effects of work and dirt and flies." The word "flies" started him off on a side-track. "Say! You should see my boys. I go up to a farm near Fox Lake and stay a week every year, suffering all sorts of tortures, in order to give my boys a chance to see farm life. I sit there nights trying to read by a vile-smelling old kerosene lamp, the flies trooping in so that you can't keep the window down, you know, and those boys lying there all the time on a hot husk bed, faces spattered with mosquito bites and sweating like pigs--and happy as angels. The roar of the flies and mosquitoes is sweetest lullaby to a tired boy." "Well, now, going back to that visit," said the interviewer with persistency to his plan.