ow 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." Mr.
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 before 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 by 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
intimate 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, Taylor, 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. The land-line work lasted three years, and each of the
parties who started by putting in $20,000, put in ten times that
amount, and Field much more. The first cable across the Gulf of St.
Lawrence was a failure. The second one held; and at