commendation for the
place. It is on record in Hale's diary that on December 27, 1775, the
day after his arrival home from Camp Winter Hill, he visited Dr.
Huntington; and in one of his New York letters he wrote, "I always with
respect remember Mr. Huntington and shall write to him if time permits."

Admitting that Nathan Hale's father and mother were his most important
early friends, we believe that Dr. Huntington, as pastor, tutor, and
friend during the six years before Nathan entered college, may have
stood not far behind the parents in deep influence upon his
character--that splendid character, destined to be one of the beacon
lights of our country's history.

(2) _Alice Adams_

Studying the lives of the founders of our republic, we are interested in
noting the early marriages that so often occurred, and which seem to
have been justified by the early mental maturity of the young men and
women in the eighteenth century.

With early marriage, large families were the rule and not the exception;
and eulogize the forefathers of New England as much as one may, no one
at all familiar with the lives of the mothers of those generations can
question the share that the foremothers had in broadening the lives
and inspiring the characters of the husbands and sons in that early
period. Nathan Hale showed the power of heredity, and Alice Adams, the
woman he is said to have loved, proved well that she too had come of no
unworthy stock.

It has been given few women to be so worthily loved as was Alice Adams,
from the time we catch our first glimpse of her till the last, in her
eighty-ninth year. She was born in June, 1757. Her mother married Deacon
Hale when Alice was in her thirteenth year. We do not know when Alice
first met Nathan Hale; but we do know that while both were very young
they found out that they loved each other, and proceeded to engage
themselves without consulting their elders. Nathan had several years of
work preparatory to his profession still before him, and, acting as they
supposed in the best interests of both the boy and the girl, the mother
and elder sister Sarah promptly discouraged the engagement and it was
broken.

In February, 1773, while Nathan was still at Yale and before she was
sixteen, Alice was married to Elijah Ripley, a prosperous merchant at
Coventry. Within two years Mr. Ripley died, aged twenty-eight, leaving
behind him a little son, also named Elijah, who died in his second year.

A