Of course, no one knows what Nathan Hale thought that last night, but it may well be believed that he did not waste his last hours in despairing regrets. If he was permitted to write farewell letters that night, they were never delivered. In the morning Hale asked if he might speak with a minister, but that was curtly denied him. “Will you lend me a Bible a moment, then?” was his dying request. “No!” snapped the marshal.
A kind-hearted British officer, who noticed the pure, honest face of the young American spy, offered him shelter from the sun in his tent during a brief delay. The heart of this enemy captain was touched, and it was he who preserved Nathan Hale’s noble words for future ages. If the young spy could have known that his death would strengthen the hearts of patriots to fight for liberty, and that what he was about to say would go resounding down the ages, it would have added to his joy that hot September day. A poet has described the moment when they came and led him out:
“To drum-beat and heart-beat
A soldier marches by;
There is color in his cheek,
There is courage in his eye;
Yet to drum-beat and heart-beat,
In a moment he must die.”
They led him to an apple tree near at hand. While they were fastening his arms behind him and tying a rope around his ankles, he gazed up into the tree. On his handsome face rested the resigned expression which is shown in the bronze and marble statues of Nathan Hale in the Yale yard where he used to play, and in the park before City Hall, in New York.
“Well, have you any confession to make?” asked the marshal. This called Nathan Hale’s mind back. He smiled at the needless question, for he had confessed the night before and had thus made a trial unnecessary. Hesitating only a moment, he answered the officer with simple courtesy, in the bravest words ever uttered by mortal man:
“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
LAFAYETTE, THE BOY HERO OF TWO WORLDS
IN a great stone building among the tree-covered hills in the south of France there lived a little boy who at birth received fourteen names and titles. He belonged to the noble French family of the Lafayettes, who had been knights for at least seven hundred years. The boy never saw his father, for shortly before the child was born, his brave young soldier father was killed in a battle with the English. The home in which this fatherless boy lived was a castle, but it looked like a great prison or a modern storage warehouse with a huge, round tower at each end. Across its few small windows were iron bars.
Out of all the Lafayette boy’s names, the family called him Gilbert. When he was eleven years old Gilbert was sent to a school in Paris where sons from French gentlemen’s families were taught the things it was thought proper for young nobles to know. First of all, they studied heraldry, which explained the coats-of-arms of their royal and noble relations and was really a sort of family history of France. The boys also learned to ride and to fence and to talk politely—even wittily, if they happened to be bright enough. Besides their own French language they learned Latin so that they could write and even speak it. Then the youths who had a taste for history were instructed in that study, not the history of the whole French people, but the records of the royal and great families, and the battles and schemes of the kings and princes.
In this boys’ college the rooms were very small, dark, and narrow, like prison cells, and the pupils were locked in at night. Gilbert was never allowed a holiday. If his mother came to see him she was permitted to talk with him in the presence of a tutor, almost as if he were a prisoner. The masters feared that a good, motherly chat with her son would distract the boy’s mind from his studies.