When Captain Montressor told Hale's dismayed friends of the terrible doom that had befallen their comrade, it must have seemed as if all the influence Hale might have had in a prolonged life, all that could come to such a man, had been sacrificed. We must not blame them if the question involuntarily rose in their hearts, "Why such waste? Why was such an influence so permanently destroyed?" Curiously enough, many years passed with little special notice by the public of Hale's death. But the leaven of patriotism works, even though slowly, and step by step Hale was coming to his own. Little by little the memory of his sacrifice for his country, and the fact that he had left words that should glow with increasing splendor, took possession of those who had ears to hear and hearts to remember. Old Linonia in Yale did not forget the splendid boy, once its Chancellor, who died as he had lived. Linonia's records still bear, in clear and perfect lines, reports his hand had written when he was its most assiduous member. Others might have forgotten him; Linonia had not. On its one-hundredth anniversary, July 27, 1853,--Commencement Week,--the poet of the occasion was Francis Miles Finch, Yale, 1846, later Judge of the New York Court of Appeals. As poet, Mr. Finch of course recalled many former members of the society. He ended with a poem on Nathan Hale in which he held his listeners spellbound as stanza after stanza, magnetic in proportion to their truthful beauty, fell from his lips. There has been a further service to his country by Judge Finch. His own character has been graven into two different poems,--the one just referred to, and one that he wrote later. The latter poem had, undoubtedly, a powerful influence in causing our national Decoration Day to be celebrated throughout the United States. The story of this poem is interesting. In a town in Mississippi certain Southern women went on a spring day, soon after the close of the Civil War, to cover with flowers the graves of their beloved dead. The gracious and tender thought must have come to them that in the graves of aliens buried among them lay those as deeply mourned in Northern homes as were those they themselves had loved. Certainly no sweeter suggestion could have been more tenderly carried out than that which led these bereaved women to spread flowers over the graves of those who were once their enemies. Mr. Finch was told of this incident, and the lines he wrote show his appreciation of the "generous deed." The poem, "The Blue and the Gray," did much to heal the wounds in both North and South. The two poems by Judge Francis Miles Finch are quoted here, the first with the drum-beat pulsing through it; the second in musical, flowing lines that carry in them sorrow, loyalty, and the community of a common bereavement. HALE'S FATE AND FAME