Madame Bernhardt alighted."

Among the celebrities who visited Denver while Field was in what he
would have called his perihelion was Miss Kate Field, with whose name
he took all the liberties of a brother, although there was no blood
relationship between them thicker than the leaves of a genealogical
compendium. He took especial pains to circulate the report through all
the West that Miss Field had brought a sitz-bath with her to alleviate
the dust and hardships of travel in the "Woolly West," where, as he
represented, she thought running water was a luxury and stationary
bath-tubs were unknown. But he atoned for this by one of the daintiest
pleasantries that ever occurred to his playful mind. When Miss Field
was preparing for her lecture tour in Mormon land she started an
inquisitive correspondence with her namesake, whose Tribune Primer was
then spreading his fame through the exchanges. The two soon discovered
that they were cousins, no matter how many times removed, but near
enough to inspire Field to entrust a letter to Uncle Sam's mail
addressed thus:

_A maiden fair of untold age
Seeks to adorn our Western stage;
How foolish of her, yet how nice
To write me, asking my advice!
New York's the city where you'll find
This prodigy of female kind;
Hotel Victoria's the place
Where you'll see her smiling face.
I pray thee, postman, bear away
This missive to her, sans delay.
These lines enclosed are writ by me--
A Field am I, a Field is she.
Two very fertile fields I ween,
In constant bloom, yet never green,
She is my cousin; happy fate
That gave me such a Cousin Kate._

From Denver to New York this pretty conceit carried the epistle just as
safely and directly as if it had borne the most prosaic superscription
the postal authorities could exact, and I venture to say that it was
handled with a smiling solicitude never bestowed on the humdrum
epistles that travel neither faster nor surer for being marked
"important and immediate." This was before Field had formed the habit
of illuminating everything he wrote with colored inks, or the missive
to his Cousin Kate would have expressed his variegated fancies in all
the colors of the rainbow, especially red.

In a short sketch, entitled "Eugene Field in Denver," Wolfe Londoner
speaks of his friend as a "bright ray of laughing sunshine across this
shadowy vale, a mine of sentiment and charity, an avalanche of fun and
happiness," but on