BIOGRAPHY OF KATE CLAXTON

This famous conflagration broke out on May 3d, 1846, and has been raging with more or less violence ever since.  She comes of a famous family, being a lineal descendant of the furnace mentioned in scriptural history as having been heated seven times hotter than it could be heated, in honor of the tripartite alliance of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.  One of her most illustrious ancestors performed in Rome on the occasion of the Emperor Nero’s famous violin obligato, and subsequently appeared in London when a large part of that large metropolis succumbed to the fiery element.  This artist is known and respected in every community where there is a fire department, and the lurid flames of her genius, the burning eloquence of her elocution, and the calorific glow of her consummate art have acquired her fame, wherever the enterprising insurance agent has penetrated.  Mrs. O’Leary’s cow vainly sought to rob her of much of her glory, but through the fiery ordeal of jealousy, envy, and persecution, has our heroine passed, till, from an incipient blaze, she has swelled into the most magnificent holocaust the world has ever known.  And it is not alone in her profession that this gifted adustion has amazed and benefited an incinerated public:  to her the world is indebted for the many fire-escapes, life-preservers, salamander safes, improved pompier ladders, play-house exits, standpipes, and Babcock extinguishers of modern times.  In paying ardent homage, therefore, to this incandescent crematory this week, let us recognize her not only as the reigning queen of ignition, diathermancy, and transcalency, but also as the promoter of many of the ingenious and philanthropic boons the public now enjoys.

This was written in November, 1883, and is worthy of remark as an illustration of how in that day Field began deliberately to multiply words, each having a slight difference of meaning, as an exercise in the use of English—­a practice that eventually gave him a vocabulary of almost unlimited range and marvellous accuracy.

The patience of the reader forbids that I should attempt an enumeration of all Field’s friendships with stage folk, or of the unending flow of good-natured raillery and sympathetic comment that kept his favorites among them ever before the public eye.  When it came Field’s time, all untimely, to pay the debt we all must pay, it was left for Sir Henry Irving, the dean of the English-speaking profession, to acknowledge in a brief telegram his own and its debt to the departed poet and paragrapher in these words: 

The death of Eugene Field is a loss not only to his many friends, but to the world at large.  He was distinctly a man of genius, and he was dowered with a nature whose sweetness endeared him to all who knew him.  To me he was a loved and honored friend, and the world seems vastly the poorer without him.

Of what singular materials and contradictory natures