“Charles Dickens was the novelist of humanity, and Kate Field is, to-day, his most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter.  Those who were so fortunate as to attend her reading last evening enjoyed an intellectual pleasure not soon forgotten.  They saw a slender, graceful woman, dressed in creamy white, with soft laces falling about her; with low, broad brow, and earnest, sympathetic eyes, under a cloud of soft dark hair.  With a rich and finely modulated voice of remarkable power of expression, she held her audience for two hours spellbound by the magic of her genius.”

In Colorado Miss Field enjoyed an unique and picturesque holiday.  Picnics and excursions were gotten up in her honor; special trains were run; she rode on horseback with gay parties of friends twenty-five miles a day; she joined friends from New York who were camping out on “The Needles,” and she made a visit to the San Juan Silver-mining district.  Among other diversions she had the honor of naming a new watering place, located on “The Divide,” an hour by rail from Denver, to which, in honor of General Palmer who has practically “made” that region, Miss Field gave the name of Palmero, the Spanish for Palmer.

How unconsciously Miss Field came to study the problem presented by the peculiar institutions of Utah is curiously indicated in a letter from Salt Lake City, under date of Jan. 16, 1884, which she wrote to the Boston Herald, and which opens thus:—­

“I know of nothing that would do Bostonians so much good as a prolonged trip across this continent, giving themselves sufficient time to tarry at different points and study the people.  For myself—­about half a Bostonian—­I became so ashamed of sailing east year after year, that last summer I made up my mind to hitch my wagon to the star of empire and learn as much of my own country as I knew of Europe.  I started from New York in July, expecting to be absent three months, and in that period obtain an intelligent idea of the far West.  After passing two months and a half in wonderful Colorado and only seeing a fraction of the Centennial state, I began to realize that in two years I might, with diligence, get a tolerable idea of this republic west of the Mississippi.  Cold weather setting in, and the fall of snow rendering mountain travelling in Colorado neither safe nor agreeable, I came to Utah over the wonderful Denver & Rio Grande railroad, intending to pass a week prior to visiting New Mexico and Arizona.  My week expired on the 22nd day of October and still I linger among the ‘saints.’  I am regarded as more or less demented by eastern friends.  If becoming interested in a most extraordinary anomaly to such an extent as to desire to study it and to be able to form an intelligent opinion therein is being demented, then I am mad indeed, for I’ve not yet got to the bottom of the Utah problem, and if I lived here years, there would still be much to learn.  Despite this last discouraging fact,