276 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
for forgery, and the well-known lawyer Bourke Cockran did 
all that he could for the defendant. It was useless. 
Cyrus Field collapsed under these terrible shocks. On his 
seventy-second birthday, at the end of November, he found 
that of the large fortune he had invested in telegraphs and 
railroads, only a thousand pounds in Anglo-American cable 
stock remained. He felt unable further to assist his family, 
for which he had always cherished a deep affection. His 
daughter Alice, who had never married, was also ill and men- 
tally unbalanced. 
So depleted were the family’s resources, according to his 
daughter Isabella, that in the spring he would not have been 
able to go to the country home at Ardsley if his friend Pier- 
pont Morgan had not advanced the necessary funds. Morgan, 
who was often accused of ruthlessness in business, did many 
a generous deed that was never advertised. It was he also who 
paid the premiums on Field’s life insurance, one policy of 
which had been taken out nearly fifty years before. 
The change to the country air did not benefit the aging 
man, as his family had hoped. His weakness and nervousness 
increased. The accumulation of calamities had proved too 
much for a constitution that had never been strong and had 
been sustained chiefly by enthusiasm. 
Early on July 12, 1892, the family were called to the bed- 
side, including the brothers David, Stephen, and Henry. The 
end came that morning. Cyrus Field’s long struggle was over. 
An account of his last illness was published in the New York 
Tribune, which said: ‘‘He was delirious and suffered from 
several attacks of acute nervousness, and on those occasions he 
again went through the trials and struggles of the days when 
he was working night and day at that stupendous undertak- 
ing which has made him famous. At one minute he would 
imagine that he was at a port on the Newfoundland coast 
superintending the departure of ships with the cable to the 
Irish coast. In his delirium he would cry out, ‘Hold those 
