Bertha Honoré Palmer was handsome, elegant, and distinguished, but so were many other women of her set: what made her preëminent among them was a rare gift of leadership combined with great executive ability. After the terrible fire of 1871, her husband, like other prominent business men, found himself a heavy loser from the disaster. It was at this time that the property which later became the Lake Shore Drive came into the market. When a great slice of this land was offered to Mr. Palmer, it seemed a hopeless proposition and he decided to turn it down. His wife, however, persuaded him to make the investment; she had the vision to foresee that what was then mere waste land on the borders of Lake Michigan was destined to become the fashionable quarter of the city. Mr. Palmer, who was much older than his wife, made a will that for chivalry is unsurpassed. After leaving the larger part of his immense fortune to his wife, he added a clause setting aside a certain sum of money, the income from which should be paid to Mrs. Palmer’s husband, in case she should marry again. Mrs. Leiter and her handsome daughters had already given up Chicago for Washington. They were sometimes at their country place at Geneva Lake, where we spent a pleasant week-end. I studied Mrs. Leiter’s curious use of English with some care and came to the conclusion that she was word blind as some people are color blind. “Mr. A. is a very deep-seated man,” she once said to me of a common acquaintance, repeating the phrase earnestly, “a very deep-seated man”, shaking her handsome head and dismissing Mr. A. in an imperial manner. I never quite knew what she meant to imply about poor Mr. A. One evening at the Auditorium Theater a friend brought Eugene Field into our box and introduced him to us. We had a brief chat between the acts. What had struck me first about him was his closely cropped, almost shaven head, so unlike other poets I had known. When he had gone, our host asked: “What do you think of Eugene Field?” “Doesn’t he look rather like a convict?” I laughed, meaning to be funny. As we were leaving the theater, Mr. Field came up to me in the lobby and said cheerily: “I hear you say I look like a convict. Remember I am not a bird of plumage, but a bird of song. As for you,” with a low bow, “you look like the daughter of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”