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Show BILL NYE AND KATE FIELD. A Witty Chicago Journalist Talks Kate's Bath Tub. Interview with Eugene Field. "Of course you know Bill Nye, the humorist?" T "In and out of season I know Bill Nye. He is the homeliest man in the seven States. Not many months ago Bill and I and another went on a trip West together. to-gether. William was lecturing. The more I traveled with him and saw him in the primitive state, the more I became convinced of "his ugliness. I became really ashamed of him. At the hotels where we stopped, Bill's homeliness actually ac-tually took away my appetite. His face will stop the hands of a clock any day. Yet with all these trongly developed physical phenomena, Bill is vain, positively posi-tively vain, and loves to pose before the ladies. He does it, too, with tact and diplomacy di-plomacy that wins admiration and makes the fair creatures forget that he has a face. Nye is bald. He is painfully bald. Out of one hundred bald heads his would be the man you would . pick as the mark for particular baldness. He is tall and loose jointed, and wherever he goes he is attired in a claw-hammer coat. . He Btands with his hands behind and his toes turned in. It is a circus to see the lecturer come out and pose with that coat on. I didn't know that he had a game eye until recently. re-cently. He i3 totally blind in hi3 left ;ye and has a cast in it. His full name s Edward William Nye. He knows how ;o talk sweetlv and sprightly to ladies, ind it goes without saying that he is very wpular, not only with them, but with nen. He gets good. prices for his work, (veil; I know them all Eli Perkins, Bob Burdette", Armory Knox, George Hutch-ns, Hutch-ns, and Petroleum V. Nasby. Now there is Nasby, one of the wealthiest funny men in the lot. He is simply immensely wealthy, and owns property everywhere. The last time I saw him was in Chicago, at the Columbia theatre. He was with Dr. Morris Munford, who is quite tall and slender. Petroleum is medium height and very broad. I laughed like Jacques in the forest when I saw the wo going about together, for they reminded me of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, or the picture, 'Before and After Taking.' The doctor is making a great success of the Kansas City Times. The paper is well edited and is a magnificent property. He worked it up from bankruptcy bank-ruptcy into affluence, and he cannot be too highly praised. R. M. Field, who writes the bright things for the paper, and who is another of your homely men, claims to be my brother." "Are you not related to Miss Kate Field, the anti-Mormon lecturer?" - i "She is a cousin of mine. Ah, Kate is j very thrifty, financially speaking. She has property in Washington, the bulk of it lying down in the delightfully situated Potomac flats. She intends to convert the place into a fashionable watering resort re-sort and erect a mammoth house with flamboyant gables and Etruscan bay windows at the corner of Four-and-a-Half Q-sts., N. W. This structure will j be permanently used as a home for widows wid-ows and orphans of the Revolutionary heroes. The first time I met Kate was on a train out West. She had a large zinc sitz-bath tub, presented to her by Sir Charles Dilke. She imagined that no such a thing as a bath tub could hft had in Denver. I understand that quite recently, re-cently, Miss Field has lost all faith in human hu-man friendships and has fallen to keeping keep-ing a pet poodle." |