The last sentence of the last chapter is a true indication of character. Mr. Field had doubtless expected, when he retired from business, to retire permanently, and to spend in ease not only the evening and the afternoon but the meridian of his life. But it was not to be, and one may well imagine that his previous experiences had been a providential preparation for the great work of his life, the great work of his time. It matters little who first conceived as a dream the notion of electric communication across the Atlantic. To realize that dream there was needed precisely the qualities and the circumstances of Cyrus W. Field. Here was a man whose restless energy had not yet begun to be impaired by time, but who was already a successful man. In virtue of his success he was able not only to devote himself to a work which he was convinced was as practical as it was beneficent--he was able also to enlist the co-operation of wealthy men, whom the project of an Atlantic cable would have left quite cold if it had been propounded to them by a mere electrician. They could not have helped regarding the scheme as chimerical and fantastic if a purely scientific man had approached them with it, even with the most plausible figures to prove its practicability and profitableness. To give it a chance of success with them, it must be presented and believed in by one whose previous life and whose personal success forbade them to regard him as a visionary, and who by force of his position as well as of his qualities was able to infect them with some part of his own confidence and enthusiasm. Mr. Field was that unique man, and hence it is that he must be regarded as the one indispensable factor in the execution of a transatlantic system of telegraphic communication, inevitably soon to become a world-wide system, and far to outrun in actual fact the poet's daring dream of putting "a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes." It was on Mr. Field's return from Washington late in the month of January, 1854, that his brother Matthew asked him to have a talk with Mr. Frederick N. Gisborne, who was stopping at the Astor House. Mr. Gisborne was an engineer and telegraph operator, and his desire had been to connect St. John's, Newfoundland, with the telegraphic system of the United States. In the spring of 1852 the Legislature of Newfoundland had passed an act incorporating the Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company, and had given to Mr. Gisborne the exclusive right to erect telegraphs in Newfoundland for thirty years, with certain concessions of land by way of encouragement to be granted upon the completion of the telegraph from St. John's to Cape Ray, and on his return to New York he formed a company, and in the spring of 1853 set vigorously to work to build the line. He had successfully completed some thirty or forty miles when his work was suddenly brought to a standstill by the failure of the company to furnish the means to carry it on.