Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/194

 :;:,(, WORKMEN AND HEROES Cyrus Williams, and the West from Dr. Stephen West, the predecessor of Dr David Dudley Field in the pulpit at Stockbridge. It is said of the child that he was of very delicate organization, so weak and frail that his body " had to be supported by a frame in which he could roll around the room till his limbs could get strength to bear him." There was, however (as his younger brother, Dr. Henry M. Field, the historian of the family, says in his vigorous English), " a nervous energy and elasticity derived from his mother," that brought hiro up, and " once set upon his little feet, he developed by incessant motion," and he was noted for " restless activity," a characteristic of his whole life. His frame, always slight, " became tough and wiry, capable of great effort and great endur- ance." Cyrus was the one of the Field boys who did not go to college. When fifteen years of age, his brother, David Dudley, who was nearly fifteen years his senior, and lived until his ninetieth year, secured a place for him in the store of A. T. Stewart. Cyrus was a thorough country boy, and his mother's boy, and did not take kindly to the city at first. Dr. Field says : " I well remember hear- ing my brother Matthew tell mother how Cyrus had come down to the boat on which he left the city, and wept bitterly ; and mother telling him, the next time he went to New York, if his little brother felt so still, to bring him home." M r. Field soon grew tired of being a clerk, and launched out in the manufacture and sale of paper. His capital was his brains and in twelve years, when he was but thirty-three years old, he was in possession of a handsome fortune, and thought of retiring. This, however, was only a phase of restlessness, and he had before him nearly forty years of extraordinary activity. His great works and trials, his counting his gains and losses by millions, his glory and his sorrows, were all be- fore him. The first of his many long journeys was to South America, with the artist Church, who painted for him the " Heart of the Andes." He ascended the Magdalena River, climbed the Andes to Bogota, crossed to Quito, and bv way of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, reached the western coast, and returned home October, 1853, in time for the golden wedding of his parents. Then he set about the task of retirement from business, and was in a feverish state of energy upon that subject, and drifted into the twelve years harassing struggle, from the time when, in his house in Gramercy Park, he sat alone and turned over the globe, and thought of a telegraphic cable through the Atlantic, until the tremendous task was gloriously finished. After writing to Maury and Morse, Mr. Field called in his next-door neighbor, Peter Cooper ; and next called Moses Taylor, who listened for an hour without saying a word ; and brought in his most inti- mate friend, Marshall O. Roberts ; and then Mr. Chandler White (who died the next year and was succeeded by Wilson G. Hunt). They organized "The New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company," Field, Cooper, Tay- lor, and Roberts putting in $20,000 each, and White a smaller sum. Field and White, with David Dudley Field as legal adviser, set forth for Newfoundland to get a charter, and called it a fishing excursion. They got a land donation, and an exclusive right to land cable for fifty years. There was first to build a line of telegraph four hundred miles through the wilderness, across the huge island