s the King of Denmark,
who visited his remote possession at the same time; and they thought
Field even a greater discoverer than Columbus, for they said the
Genoese navigator 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
Williams 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 subscription 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
hundreds 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