GENTLEMEN: Having received information that a place is allotted me in the army, and being inclined, as I hope for good reasons, to accept it, I am constrained to ask as a favor that which scarce anything else would have induced me to, which is, to be excused from keeping your school any longer. For the purpose of conversing upon this and of procuring another master, some of your number think it best there should be a general meeting of the proprietors. The time talked of for holding it is six o'clock this afternoon, at the schoolhouse. The year for which I engaged will expire within a fortnight, so that my quitting a few days sooner, I hope, will subject you to no great inconvenience. School-keeping is a business of which I was always fond, but since my residence in this town, everything has conspired to render it more agreeable. I have thought much of never quitting it but with life, but at present there seems an opportunity for more extended public service. The kindness expressed to me by the people of the place, but especially the proprietors of the school, will always be very gratefully remembered by, gentlemen, with respect, your humble servant, NATHAN HALE CHAPTER IV A CALL TO ARMS The place "allotted" to him was that of lieutenant in the third company of the 7th Connecticut regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles Webb. No doubt exists that Lieutenant Nathan Hale was the same Nathan Hale who had won distinction in all his college work, in his subsequent teaching, and in all the events thus far associated with his early manhood, with this difference; he was now lifted to a line of service that in his opinion seemed the highest possible for him to follow, and no one who studies his subsequent course can question that in this following he found the loftiest consecration thus far possible to him. Perhaps unconsciously he was to verify the poet's assertion, "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_, The youth replies, _I can._" With no trace of merely personal ambition, but with that splendid power of absorption in duty as in work, Nathan Hale followed in the steps of those devoted American patriots whose blood, so freely shed at Lexington, was calling upon their countrymen to shed theirs as freely, should duty demand it. Dead almost one hundred and forty years, we still are thrilled by proofs of the splendid manhood henceforth to be so prominent in every remaining day of Hale's brief life. A few letters to friends, a fairly comprehensive diary for a few months, his camp-book, and the recollections of a few of the officers and of his body-servant, give a moderately complete picture of Nathan Hale for a few brief weeks, during which time he had been doing all in his power to perfect himself and the men under him in the duties of soldiers.