The impersonation of Wilde a la Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, “Patience,” was well calculated to deceive all who were not in the secret.  Field’s talent as a farceur and a mimic enabled him to assume and carry out the expression of bored listlessness which was the popular idea of the leader of aesthetes.  Nobody in the curious, whooping, yelling crowd assembled along the well-advertised route suspected the delusion, and after an hour’s parade Field succeeded in making his exit from public gaze without betraying his identity.

When Wilde turned up the next day he was not a little mystified to learn that he had created a sensation driving around Denver in the raiments of Bunthorne, while in reality travelling over the prairie in a palace-car.  It was Field himself who relieved his curiosity with a highly amusing narrative of the experience of the joker lounging in the seat of honor in the landau.

Wilde, it is related, saw nothing funny in the affair, nor was he provoked at it.  His only comment was, “What a splendid advertisement for my lecture.”

It was while in Denver that Field had numerous and flattering offers to leave journalism for the stage, and more than once he was sorely tempted to make the experiment.  In the natural qualifications for the theatrical profession he was most richly endowed.  In the arts of mimicry he had no superior.  He had the adaptable face of a comedian, was a matchless raconteur, and a fine vocalist.  At a banquet or in a parlor he was an entertainer of truly fascinating parts.  During his life in St. Louis and Kansas City his inclination had led him to seek the society of the green-room, and in Denver his position enlarged the circle of his acquaintance with the theatrical profession, until it embraced almost every prominent actor and actress in America, and was subsequently extended to include the more celebrated artists of England.  Among his favorites was Madame Bernhardt, whose several visits to the United States afforded him an opportunity for some of the most entertaining sketches that ever delighted his Chicago readers.  None of these contained more pith in little than that brief paragraph with which he opened his column one day, to the effect that “An empty cab drove up to the stage-door of the Columbia Theatre last night, from which 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: