Surprise is expressed in certain quarters because Mike Kelly, the base-ball virtuoso, has made a hit upon the dramatic stage.  The error into which many people have fallen is in supposing that Kelly was simply a clever base-ball machine.  He is very much more than this:  he is an unusually bright and intelligent man.  As a class, base-ball professionals are either dull brutes or ribald brutes; ignorance as dense as Egyptian darkness has seemed to constitute one of the essentials to successful base-ball playing, and the average professional occupies an intellectual plane hardly above that of the average stall-fed ox or the fat pig at a country fair.  Mike Kelly stands pre-eminent in his profession; no other base-ball player approaches him.  He is in every way qualified for a better career than that which is bounded on one side by the bleaching boards, and on the other by the bar-room.  Of course he is a good actor.  He is too smart to attempt anything at which he does not excel.

But I have been diverted from telling of the sport in which Field was an active participant by the recollection of his critical and literary expertness in the great game in which he never took an active part.  Once when Melville Stone was asked what was his dearest wish at that instant, he replied, “to beat Field and Thompson bowling.”  This was in the days before bowling was the fashionable winter sport it has since become.  The alleys in Chicago in 1885 were neither numerous nor in first-class condition; but after Field once discovered that he had a special knack with the finger-balls we hunted them up and tested most of them.  After a while we settled down on the alleys under Slosson’s billiard-room on Monroe Street for our afternoon games and on the Superior Alleys on North Clark Street on the evenings when it was my turn to walk home with “Gene.”  Rolling together we were scarcely ever overmatched, and he was the better man of the two.  He rolled a slow, insinuating ball.  It appeared to amble aimlessly down the alley, threatening to stop or to sidle off into the gutter for repose.  But it generally had enough momentum and direction to reach the centre pin quartering, which thereupon, with its nine brothers, seemed suddenly smitten with the panic so dear to the bowler’s heart.  I never knew another bowler so quick to discover the tricks and peculiarities of an alley or so crafty to master and profit by them.  Whenever the hour was ripe for a game Field would send the boy with some such taunt or challenge as is shown in the accompanying fac-simile.

I shall never forget, nor would an elaborately colored score by Field permit me, if I would, his chagrin over the result of one of these matches.  He and Willis Hawkins had challenged Cowen and me to a tourney, as he called it, of five strings.  His record of this “great game of skittles,” all figured out by frames, strikes and spares in red, blue, yellow, and green ink, shows the following result: