The four famous brothers have given the Field family an almost unique celebrity in this country. They were the sons of the Rev. David Dudley Field, of Western Massachusetts, the room-mate at Yale College of Jeremiah Evarts, father of William 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 how 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.