And yet, as a people, Americans were walking as if their personal plans lay easily in their own control. Scores of young men were fitting themselves for ordinary callings, Nathan Hale among them. His father's plans combining with his own appeared to be that he was to teach for a while, and then follow his brother Enoch into the ministry. As it proved, his days as a teacher were numbered. He was never to enter a pulpit, though he was to utter one sentence that, graven upon bronze or granite, will last while America lasts. He was to teach, by his last, unpremeditated words, and by an example more potent than any other in American history, what all generations of Americans must venerate--the sublimity of a complete sacrifice. Smoldering discontent on the part of the Americans, waxing stronger and stronger for a decade, and the aggressive course of action on the part of the British authorities, finally culminated in a sudden outbreak, as matches applied to gunpowder; and on the 19th of April, 1775, the first blood of the American Revolution was shed. Settlement after settlement, big and little, learned the facts as rapidly as couriers on horseback could carry them, and the thirteen colonies arrayed themselves against one of the most powerful monarchies of the world. The story is too well known to need recalling here, save as it draws Nathan Hale toward his doom. Within a few days after the fatal 19th of April, four thousand Connecticut volunteers were on their way to Boston to help Massachusetts in its earliest struggle with the English. Ununiformed, undisciplined, straight from whatever had been their ordinary vocation, with whatever they owned in the way of arms and ammunition, they went hurrying toward Boston. Israel Putnam, renowned veteran of the "Old French War," was plowing in his fields at Pomfret, Connecticut, when he heard the stirring news. Leaving his plow in the furrow, he hastened to his house, left a few orders for the management of his farm and the comfort of his family, and marched at the head of a body of volunteers toward the camp near Boston. We are told that, in some households, families sat up all night, the fathers melting their pewter plates into bullets for ammunition to be used by their sons, and the mothers and sisters fashioning for them, with all possible speed, the clothing they could not go without. On the arrival of the news from Boston, the people in New London at once held a meeting. Hon. Richard Law, District Judge of Connecticut and Chief Justice of the Superior Court, was chairman. Hale was one of the speakers.