I know the unhappy predicament in which I stand; I know that much is expected of me; I know that without men, without arms, without ammunition, without anything fit for the accommodation of a soldier, little is to be done, and what is mortifying, I know that I cannot stand justified to the world without exposing my own weakness, and injuring the cause, by declaring my wants which I am determined not to do farther than unavoidable necessity brings every man acquainted with them. My situation is so irksome to me at times, that if I did not consult the public good more than my own tranquillity, I should long ere this have put everything on the cast of a die. So far from my having an army of twenty thousand men, well armed, I have been here with less than half that number, including sick, furloughed, and on command; and those neither armed nor clothed as they should be. In short, my situation has been such, that I have been obliged to conceal it from my own officers. The second letter was written to Congress: To make men well acquainted with the duties of a soldier, requires time. To bring them under proper discipline and subordination, not only requires time, but is a work of great difficulty; and in this army where there is so little distinction between officers and soldiers, requires an uncommon degree of attention. To expect, then, the same service from raw and undisciplined recruits, as from veteran soldiers, is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen. On the 23d of December, 1775, Hale began his first and only trip to Connecticut for the sake of securing additional enlistments. If on this one visit home he became engaged--as some have believed--to the woman he had so long loved, now a widow of about nineteen, Alice Adams Ripley, we may infer that love brightened his embassy even though patriotism inspired it. No record remains of the glorified hours he may have spent in Coventry. We have good reason to believe that, if he survived the war, he expected to marry the woman he had so faithfully loved. After a few brief days in his home, he left it, never to return, speeding on his way to serve his country's needs. If this new zest entered his life at this time, we can easily imagine as he fared on, striving to arouse his countrymen to their duty as patriots, that the happiest hours of his life were urging him forward to the most perfect service he could render in the present, and to unlimited hopes and ambitions for the future he might well expect was awaiting him. Crowned by human love, and with unlimited opportunities to serve his country, who can tell by what "vision splendid" he was "on his way attended"? Who can help rejoicing that such days, brief as they were, and uplifting as they must have been, were given to this man, now past twenty?