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W. C. Fields
by the New York Transcript as being "the finest act in the first part of the program" at the Jardin de Paris, a roof garden on top of the New York Theatre. Again, the week following April 23, 1908, he was playing the Orpheum in Boston and Hathaway's Theatre in Lowell, Massachusetts. Variety, having interviewed him, said, "When W. C. Fields, the juggler, appears on the other side this year he will present a brand-new novelty in the juggling line. Fields has been hard at work for several months constructing a comedy act which will be the first of its kind ever attempted. He will offer an entirely new routine of comedy juggling, featuring a burlesque croquet shot in which the croquet ball is made to go through all the wickets on one shot, the trick being patterned after the pool shot now used in his act."
The old New York Star of December 19, 1908, had a story about Fields. It ran in connection with a picture the juggler had drawn of himself. "W. G. Fields, who was recently on a tour of English and Continental music halls," the piece said, "is again making vaudeville audiences laugh in this country. Mr. Fields' comedy is fluent, unforced, and quite unique. No wonder managers pay him big salaries for making their patrons laugh! He does that, all right, and some more besides." Of the caricature (whose caption was "The Great Silly") the Star said, "This quaint little portrait does only faint justice to his beauty as he walks out on the stage in a scrubby beard and evening clothes that must have seen better days." On March 2, 1909, he was at Keith's in Philadelphia, where the Record said of him, "It would be hard to find anybody better in the juggling line than W. C. Fields. He is an artist in whose work there is no flaw." On the eighteenth of that same month he was up in Boston again, at Keith's, where the Traveler felt that "he certainly is a wonder when it comes to working those phony tricks."
Not long after that he went to Europe, and when he returned,
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