More about Miss Field.

Miss Kate Field, who is to lecture in this city next Thursday evening, is in many respects a most remarkable woman. None of her sex possesses to so marked a degree every feminine charm, coupled with an intellectual vigor that is certainly masculine. Miss Field’s life has been a romantic one. She was born (about thirty years ago) in New Orleans, and was educated in the Convent de St. Genevieve, near that city. When sixteen years of age she was sent to Europe to “finish off;” but, while travelling in Sicily, she was seized by brigands, who demanded seventy thousand livres for her ransom. This sum was paid by the family of the young girl, after she had been a captive for six weeks, during which time she acquired a thorough acquaintance with the Italian language, and obtained a complete knowledge of the customs of the banditti. A narrative of her experience in the Sicilian fastnesses appeared in “El Banano Napoli” (1865), and is now regarded as a model of Italian romance. In 1867 Miss Field visited Spain as the guest of Signora Serrano; and it was at this time that she was wooed by the young Marquis Miguel Maria Jesus del Ratz, whose melancholy and 201tragic death, while attending a bull-fight in Madrid, has already been detailed in these columns. This was the one love-affair of Miss Field’s life; but the case of Manrico Bolero, the chief of the banditti who abducted the fair girl, deserves more than passing mention. It appears that while she was a captive, this Bolero became deeply sensible of the personal and mental charms of young Kate: his suit was vain, however, the conscientious girl refusing to become the bandit’s bride. After she was ransomed, the image of her beauty, and the recollection of her goodness and her wit, so preyed upon the mind of the brigand, that he forsook his godless occupations, distributed his ill-gotten gains among the poor, became an inmate of a monastery, and even now, under the name of Brother Felix, devotes his remaining days to Benedictine piety, and the manufacture of a well-known cordial of the same name.

Miss Field returned to her native land in the spring of 1883, and since that time has published numerous books, written and delivered several lectures, and superintended a number of social reforms, calculated to alleviate the sufferings of, and to emancipate from political bondage, the feminine sex. The failure of her philanthropic movement in New York some years ago, whereby she sought to introduce a female-suspender system, which would supersede the odious female garter—this failure, we say, was due wholly to the duplicity of 202the one man whom, with many other noble women, she had admitted into a business partnership. But since that unfortunate—though none the less praiseworthy—venture, prosperity has attended the earnest little lady. Her literary work has brought her handsome returns, her lectures have been highly profitable; and certain investments in Washington real-estate have been so fortunate, that she is now quoted by the leading commercial agencies among the wealthy women of America.