lliam M. Evarts. Field and
Evarts entered college together in 1798, and graduated in 1802. The
American Fields are the descendants of John Field, the astronomer of
Ardsley, in Yorkshire, who gained a great reputation by publishing
astronomical tables, and died in 1587. Ardsley, it has not passed
from the general recollection, was the name of the estate on the
Hudson where for so many years Mr. Cyrus W. Field made his summer
home.

The family name was in the fifteenth century changed from Feld,
Feild, Felde, and Fielde, into its present form; and John Field, the
astronomer, was the first to introduce the Copernican system in
England, and he received a patent in 1558, authorizing him to bear
as a crest over his family arms, an arm issuing from clouds and
supporting a globe. Dr. Richard Field, chaplain of Queen Elizabeth,
was of the same family, and author of the "Book of the Church,"
republished in four volumes at Oxford in 1843.

It was the last day of autumn, November 30, 1819, at the Morgan Place,
on a hill that sloped to the river, near Stockbridge, Mass., that
Cyrus West Field was born. There were three older brothers--David
Dudley, Timothy Beale, and Matthew Dickinson. The Cyrus came from a
man of note in the town, named 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 him 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 endurance." 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 hearing my brother Matthew tell
mother h