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audience. The awful shade of Hazlitt hung black over the hall. Fields kicked his cigar boxes, tripped over his cane, dropped a billiard ball on his foot, and probed the air for hats. Day after day he battled Hazlitt, juggling like a man with arthritis. At one point he decided he was through. But in due course his natural feeling about critics returned, and he resumed his work without assistance. "I was almost put out of business by a well-meaning corpse," he remarked later.
The experience taught Fields a lesson. It reinforced his disinclination to accept counsel; thereafter he was rarely known to listen to anybody about anything. Not long after the tussle with Hazlitt, he appeared in Edinburgh and became ill there. He ran a temperature, lost weight, and looked unnaturally rosy in the cheeks. An Edinburgh specialist, summoned by the music-hall manager, visited the sick man and took soundings. His examination required two or three visits and involved a number of tests which struck the patient as excessively annoying. Fields took a notion, which was not entirely foreign to him in other cases, that the doctor was trying to badger him for some mysterious reason of his own. This notion was, he felt, more than justified when the specialist presented a bill for four guineas and handed down his diagnosis. "You're a very sick man," he said to Fields, who was regarding the bill with a look of stupefied incredulity. "You'll have to be hospitalized for a long period and kept on a careful diet. If not, you won't live six months." As soon as the doctor left to make arrangements, Fields dressed, went out and bought a bottle of whisky, then returned to his room and had a very decent time for an hour or two, after which he boarded a boat for Paris.
Twenty years later, when he was appearing in the stage play Poppy, he felt a little down again, and the management, as in Edinburgh, called a physician.
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