Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/198

 36C WORKMEN AND HEROES He was regarded by the Icelanders as almost as great a man as the King of Den mark, who visited his remote possession at the same time ; and they thought Field even a greater discoverer than Columbus, for they said the Genoese navi- gator got his knowledge of the land in the west from their ancestors, and sailed on a certainty. On the day President Garfield was shot down, he was on his way to Will- iams College, and was to dine that night with Mr. Cyrus Field at Ardsley, and go to the old place he called " the sweetest in the world " next day. A yacht was waiting to convey the President from Jersey City, when the news of the assassination became known. The President suffered mentally because he had not made adequate provision for his family, and Mr. Field headed a sub- scription list with a liberal sum, and in a few days had a quarter of a million dollars safely invested for Mrs. Garfield and her children. The motive of this timely and apt generosity was, first, to afford consolation to the dying chief magistrate. It was within the scope of the ambition of Mr. Field to span the Pacific as well as the Atlantic Ocean with a cable ; but having triumphantly overcome one ocean, he failed to put a girdle round the earth, as De Lesseps, having succeeded with the Suez Canal the only work of the age to be named with the Atlantic telegraph failed at Darien. If the prosperity of Mr. Field had continued, and the light had not gone out in his home, he would not have been content until he had ransacked the globe for ways and means to have followed the sun to Asia with the telegraph. His footsteps point the way, and the road to India is westward. The golden wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus W. Field was attended by hun- dreds of those who knew and loved them, and the great double house of the Fields, fronting on Gramercy Park, was full of bright faces and glittering with lights. The historic home was soon darkened and made desolate. The master, the renowned victor no name more certain of an honorable immortality than his was one whom " unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster." His wife passed away at Ardsley before the deeper gloom of the storm, and he died there July 12, 1892. In his delirium on the morning of his death, he was again on the stormy coast with the cable fleet ; and he said : " Hold those ships do not let them sail yet." Through the centuries there had descended to him from the old astronomer, his ancestor, the far-flashing conception of enterprise and understanding of the splendor of destiny that was his star, and mingled with its light were the gentle influences of the religion of his fathers, always to him real and radiant. He sleeps well, amid the scenes where he passed his boyhood, and for which his heart yearned always beside his beloved wife ; and carved in the marble of their tomb as the last testimony to the loving heart of his companion, are the words : " Love is eternal." The recollection of his sorrows will not, as the centuries come and go, dim the beautiful light, of his illustrious name. ^