the same as you were,
made a speech the same as you did, and then came to me to borrow money
to get out of town with. Now, how much do you want?"

According to Field, he never saw a man so greatly relieved as Mr.
Londoner was when Mr. Dana assured him that his hotel bill was paid
and he had enough money sewed into his waistcoat to carry him back to
New York, where he had a job waiting for him.

On one occasion Field accompanied the Denver Press Club on a pleasure
trip to Manitou, a summer resort that nestles in a canon at the base
of Mount Rosa. Before the party was comfortably settled in the hotel,
Field was approached by a poor woman who had lost her husband, and who
poured into his ear a sad tale of indigence and sorrow. He became
immediately interested, and at once set about devising means for her
relief. As his purse was as lean as her own and his companions were
not overburdened with the means to get back to Denver, he announced a
grand musical and dramatic entertainment, to be given in the parlors
of the hotel that evening, for the benefit of a deserving charity.
Every guest in the hotel was invited, and the members of the Press
Club spread the notices among the citizens of the village. When asked
who would be the performers, Field answered, with the utmost
nonchalance, that the Lord would provide the entertainment if Manitou
would furnish the audience. The evening came, and the parlors were
crowded with guests and villagers, but no performers. After waiting
until expectancy and curiosity had almost toppled over from tiptoe to
disgust and indignation, Field stepped to the piano with preternatural
gravity and attacked it with all the grand airs of a foreign virtuoso.
Critics would have denied that Field was a pianist, and, technically
considered, they would have been right. But his fingers had a fondness
for the ivory keys, and they responded to his touch with the sweet
melody of the forest to the wind. He carried all the favorite airs of
all the operas he had ever heard in his fingers' ends. He knew the
popular songs of the day by heart, and, where memory failed, could
improvise. He had a voice for the soft and deep chords of negro
melodies I have never heard surpassed, and with all, he had a command
of comedy and pathos which, up to this time, was little known beyond
the circle in Denver over which he reigned as the Lord of Misrule.
That night in Manitou those who were present reported that, from the
moment h