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stronger than beer before I was twelve," he liked to tell the press.
The boy spent several nights sleeping in a cellar which had a convenient, punched-out window. He would kneel outside until the owner had banked the fire, then crawl through and nest in a woodbox near the furnace. These were comfortable quarters, and he was chagrined when the window was suddenly boarded up. He finally deduced that the repairs were somehow connected with his systematic abstraction of the housewife's preserves. "The thing taught me a lesson," he once told a friend. "You've got to know where to stop."
Despite his occasional nights out, Fields stuck, for the most part, close to the social club. He arose many mornings so stiff he could scarcely muster the agility to steal. One of his chief methods of thawing out was to sit with his back against a board fence. He found that when the sun came up, boards absorbed heat quickly and transmitted it pleasurably to his back. Fields conceived a fondness for high board fences that he never lost. Years afterward, during his travels, he was likely to spot a fence and sneak off to warm himself luxuriously. Also, he acquired a sharp fixation about beds. His principal aim, he said, was to reach a station in life in which he could sleep between clean sheets every night of the year. "To this day," he told an interviewer late in life, "when I climb in between clean sheets, I smile. When I get into bed and stretch out — god damn, that's a sensation!"
Fields' offhand larceny inevitably led him into trouble. The Philadelphia police came to regard him as a one-child crime wave. He was frequently seized and flung into jail, but always, he maintained, for something of which he was innocent. "They never got me for the right offense," he liked to say. In jail, he gave whatever name came handiest at the time and so patently enjoyed the city's bounty that he was usually released without delay. Notwithstanding his enjoyment, he complained bitterly about his couch,
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