victim to the grand
estate of a victor. One sharp, brief struggle and Nathan Hale was
free--dead, but victorious!

Indefinite as are most of the details, there are some unwritten points
that may confidently be assumed.

That 22d of September was a Sabbath day, a day associated in Nathan
Hale's mind with religious observances; prayers at the family altar,
readings of the Bible, and gatherings of his friends within church
walls. Whether or not his family knew the dangerous quest on which he
had ventured, he knew that he was not absent from their memories, and
that the family were bearing him in their thoughts that Sabbath morning.
No other day could have made that assurance so real to him, and this
thought was probably one of his strongest earthly consolations and
inspirations while he was awaiting the slow but relentless preparations
for his death.

No wonder that he bore himself "calmly and with dignity," as Captain
Montressor said of him. No wonder that he died bravely--seemingly
without a tremor of soul. In his last words Nathan Hale, true and
faithful in every relation and every act of his brief life, gave to his
country more than his life, more than all the hopes he was relinquishing
so freely for her sake. In one short, indomitable breath of patriotism,
he uttered words that will be forgotten only when American history
ceases to be read.

William Cunningham, Provost Marshal of the English forces in America,
murderer and inhuman jailer, would have laughed to scorn the idea that
any being, human or divine, could preserve Nathan Hale's last words for
the inspiration of coming generations, yet a kindly British officer,
Captain John Montressor, carried them to Hale's friends.

Cunningham has left a record of brutality unsurpassed in American
history. He is himself said to have boasted that he had caused the death
of two thousand American soldiers. We know that any reference to the
prison ships in New York Harbor sets Cunningham before us as a cowardly
murderer, starving men to death by depriving them of rations which the
English supplied for them, and which he sold, pocketing the proceeds. He
stands alone on a pedestal of infamy.

The letters that Hale had written and left, as he hoped, to be delivered
to his friends, Cunningham ruthlessly destroyed, giving as his reason
that "the rebels should not know that they had a man in their army who
could die with so much firmness." Though Hale's letters were destroyed,