drastic. The
money paid him by the British Government was accursed as were the
thirty silver pieces of Iscariot; for his passion to speculate
ruined him financially some time before the end of his life, and he
breathed his last amid comparative poverty and the dread of still
darker reverses.

Extreme sensitiveness is apt to accompany a spirit of just his
high-strung, petulant, and spleenful sort. Beyond doubt he must have
suffered keen torments at the disdain with which he was everywhere
met in English society, and chiefly among the military officers whom
his very conduct, renegade though it was, had in a measure forced to
recognize him. When Lord Cornwallis gave his sword to Washington,
its point pierced Arnold's breast with a wound rankling and
incurable. He had played for high stakes with savage and devilish
desperation. Our national independence meant his future slavery; our
priceless gain became his irretrievable loss. It is stated that as
death approached him he grew excessively anxious about the risky and
shattered state of his affairs. His mind wandered, as Mrs. Arnold
writes, and he fancied himself once more fighting those battles
which had brought him honor and fame. It was then that he would call
for his old insignia of an American soldier and would desire to be
again clothed in them. "Bring me, I beg of you," he is reported to
have said, "the epaulettes and sword-knots which Washington gave me.
Let me die in my old American uniform, the uniform in which I fought
my battles!" And once, it is declared, he gave vent to these most
significant and terrible words: "God forgive me for ever putting on
any other!" That country which he forswore in the hour of its direst
need can surely afford to forgive Benedict Arnold as well. Grown the
greatest republic of which history keeps any record, America need
not find it difficult both to forget the wretched frailties of this,
her grossly misguided son, and at the same time to remember what
services he performed for her while as yet his baleful qualities had
not swept beyond all bounds of restraint.

[Signature: Edgar Fawcett.]

NATHAN HALE[2]

[Footnote 2: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By Rev. EDWARD EVERETT HALE

(1755-1776)

[Illustration: Nathan Hale.]

Nathan Hale, a martyr soldier of the American Revolution, was born
in Coventry, Conn., on June 6, 1755. When but little more than
twenty-one years old he was hanged, by order of General