W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

I don't believe that Mozart, Liszt, Paderewski, or Kreisler ever worked any harder than I did." In a few months he had mastered all the feats of the Byrne Brothers and, within the limits of his paraphernalia, had invented new ones. He was never satisfied ; he drove himself savagely. For a child of thirteen it was a demonstration of almost superhuman will, and it marked the inner compulsion that separates the genius from the mediocrity. This inexplicable fire is always a little frightening. In the autumn the ice business dwindled, and he and Wheatley reluctantly parted. Their time together had worked a tonic effect upon Fields. Many children would have found his early-morning stint onerous, but he felt that his life had become ordered at last. He had tucked away a rather neat nest cggy of six dollars and fifty cents, and he had brought his juggling a long way since the Dukinfield lemons. Though jobless, alone, stung by weather, illclothed, badly fed, pursued by bullies and harried by the police, he faced the future with contentment. To guard his savings, he took, as a stopgap, a job selling papers on a busy corner downtown. He realized that this was a descent from the ice cart, but he dug in and made it go. Between sales he was able to work in various kinds of juggling, by folding the papers this way and that. Because of the running show he put on, he pushed his sales higher than those of nearly anybody in the district. He sold papers with an elan which has perhaps never been equaled in the newshawking profession since then. "He had the flourish of a grand seigneur," says a relative who knew him in that period. "He had a trick of somehow handing out papers as though he were distributing alms." Also, Fields was probably one of the first newsies to call out any details of the day's events. This practice became commonplace in later years, though the majority of its exponents stuck pretty closely to the headlines. Fields handled things differ 3i