"'Oh,' he replied, with the fresh enthusiasm of a boy going home for vacation, 'this will be the twenty-second voyage I have made upon this business.' And his eyes twinkled as we merrily said good-bye. We heard of him no more until we saw his name signed to the despatch announcing the triumph of his blithe faith and long labor." The number of voyages is understated here. That made on May 30th, he writes, was his thirty-seventh. In his lecture on "The Masters of the Situation" Mr. James T. Fields has said: "There is a faith so expansive and a hope so elastic that a man having them will keep on believing and hoping till all danger is past and victory sure. When I talk across an ocean of three thousand miles with my friends on the other side of it, and feel that I may know any hour of the day if all goes well with them, I think with gratitude of the immense energy and perseverance of that one man, Cyrus W. Field, who spent so many years of his life in perfecting a communication second only in importance to the discovery of this country. The story of his patient striving during all that stormy period is one of the noblest records of American enterprise, and only his own family know the whole of it. It was a long, hard struggle." After a painful experience was past he never cared to recall it, and for that reason the world never knew to what straits he and his family were often pushed. Not a luxury was allowed, and during those twelve years any wish that might be expressed could only be gratified "when the cable was laid." All waited for that day, but not always patiently, for one or another was often heard to explain, "Oh, if that old cable was only at the bottom of the ocean!" and to this he would invariably answer, "That is just where I wish it to be." Neither does the world know what his books tell, that at this very time his hand was stretched out to both his relations and friends. The surrogate was so impressed with his management of a trust estate that he could not believe his statement, and said that he must take the papers home and verify them, for he had never before known that such an increase was possible. It was in London, in March, 1868, that he told of the strange fluctuations he had seen in the stock of the two telegraph companies in which he had so long been interested.