LUCK TURNS AGAIN 261 
after his death. The other son, Cyrus William Field, also 
married but developed lung trouble. 
A number of grandchildren were born, so that Cyrus Field, 
with his white beard, became something of a patriarch. The 
family loved to gather on the extensive estate at Ardsley, 
where many guests were entertained. The original twenty-one 
acres had been expanded into several hundred. Commuting 
to the city was a matter of only half an hour’s train ride, and 
the neighboring towns of Irvington and Dobb’s Ferry were 
becoming busy centers. 
In 1882, Field bought a large tract of land in the valley of 
the Saw Mill river, adjoining his estate at Ardsley. His plan 
was to build a number of model cottages for working-men, the 
rent to be ten to twenty dollars a month. Some of his friends 
in England had made similar use of their estates. However, 
the building of a city aqueduct for water supply upset his 
plans, and five years later he suffered heavy financial losses. 
He liked country life and hired a number of workers to care 
for his extensive grounds, where he raised chickens, as he had 
dreamed of doing during bleak nights on the north Atlantic. 
His workers received very considerate treatment. Unfortu- 
nately he was not able to carry out all his plans for them. 
The Northern Pacific railroad had recently been completed 
to the Pacific coast, and traveling to the West was now be- 
coming more enjoyable. Field, as a power in the railroad 
world, received special privileges on such trips. Late in the 
summer of 1884, he left in a private car with several mem- 
bers of the family for a trip to the coast. ‘They were away 
six weeks and covered over eleven thousand miles; this was 
the Victorian equivalent of automobile touring. 
After seeing Portland and Tacoma, they explored Puget 
Sound on a small steamer and saw there the forest from which 
the tall masts of the Great Eastern had been cut for transport 
to England around Cape Horn. Crossing into Canada, they 
