Excerpt from Capt. Nathan Hale: An Address Delivered at Groton, Connecticut of the Hale Memorial Day, September 7, 1881 Nathan hale was born on the oth of June, 1755, in Coventry, hard by us here, a town in which one would be glad, then or now, to have been born. He was born from a mother whom one would have been proud to have been born from. The son of a father whom one would be glad to call father. His early education, in the midst of a large family of brothers and sisters, was the education of that distinctly domestic type, under definite religious direction, which one is tempted to call a New England education, when one speaks of the best custom of those days. It seems to have been simple without austerity, religious without terror it looked forward to the best, and upward to the noblest; and there was no service to man or God to which the boy trained in such influences of home, neighborhood, and Church, might not aspire. With his brother Enoch, scarcely a year older than he, Nathan Hale entered Yale College when he was four teen years old, having in view, perhaps, even then, the profession of a minister, which he certainly had in View afterward. He thus hoped to enter the service both of God and of man. Before I go further, may I say one word on the visi ble effect of such distinctly religious training, as given in these old Puritan congregations of New England, in the political struggle of all that time? No man under stands the political history of the Revolution, who does not remember what for a century and a half had been the religious and ecclesiastical history of these New Englanders. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.