But happy as were these college days and home-comings, and rich as were the harvests gleaned in them, the four years in college halls sped swiftly, and in 1773 Enoch Hale and Nathan turned their faces toward the future; the one to a long life and faithful Christian service, the other toward the briefest of mortal days, but to a service whose memory will not end till his college walls shall have crumbled, and the names of all its heroic sons faded from the earth. For even though stones may crumble, influence lives on.
It has already been said that at graduation Nathan Hale stood among the first thirteen in a class of thirty-six. On Commencement Day, September 3, 1773, he took part in a forensic debate on the question, "Whether the Education of Daughters be not, without any just reason, more neglected than that of Sons."
In "Memories of a Hundred Years" Dr. Edward Everett Hale says: "As early as 1772 there appears at Yale College the first question ever debated by the Linonian Society. It was, 'Is it right to enslave the Affricans?' I think, by the way, that this record, bad spelling and all, is made by my great-uncle, Nathan Hale." These debates show how seriously, even in the colonial period, men were thinking of the urgent problems of later days.
In the debate first mentioned, the others taking part in it were Benjamin Tallmadge, Ezra Samson, and William Robinson. Some account of Major Tallmadge's after life is given in later pages. Samson was, for a time, a clergyman, and then became an editor, first in Hudson, New York, and then of the Courant, at Hartford, Connecticut.
William Robinson was a direct descendant of Pastor John Robinson of Leyden. He studied for the ministry and was ordained in 1780 at Southington, Connecticut. In the winter of that year—which was one of the coldest and most severe on record—he walked the whole distance from Windsor to Southington, about thirty miles, on snowshoes, to be installed as pastor, an office he held for forty-one years.
CHAPTER III
A Call to Teach
College days behind them, Nathan, now eighteen years old, and Enoch pressed on toward their future. Here, to some extent, we part with Enoch, catching only occasional glimpses of him in a few straggling letters to his brother. It is probable that, as he intended to enter the ministry, he soon began his theological studies. In 1775 he was licensed to preach. Nathan, however, turned toward teaching as the next step in his career.
In the meantime Nathan's love for Alice Adams had not prospered. An older brother, John, had married Alice Adams's elder sister Sarah, and the mother and sister of Alice thought that she should not wait four or five years for Nathan. Perhaps they decided that two intermarriages in one family were quite enough; anyway, they induced Alice to accept the offer of a prosperous merchant of Coventry, Mr. Elijah Ripley, and a short time before Nathan's graduation her marriage had apparently terminated their personal relations.