“Just after the Battle of Lexington, at a town-meeting, with the audacity of boyhood, he cried out, ‘Let us never lay down our arms till we have achieved independence!’ Not yet two years out of Yale College, he secured release from the school he was teaching in New London; enlisted in Webb’s Regiment, the 7th Connecticut; by the first of September was promoted from Lieutenant to Captain; and on the fourteenth, marched to Cambridge. He shared in the achievement at Dorchester Heights, and his regiment was one of the first five that were despatched to New London, and thence to New York, by water. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1776, while the garrison of Brooklyn Heights was being hurried to the boats, Hale, with a sergeant and four of his men, attempted to burn the frigate _Phœnix_; and did actually capture one of her tenders, securing four cannon. At a meeting of officers, Washington stated that ‘he needed immediate information of the enemy’s plans.’ When dead silence ensued, Hale, the youngest of the Captains, still pale from recent sickness, spoke out: ‘I will undertake it. If my country demands a _peculiar_ service, its claims are imperious.’ During the second week in September, taking his Yale College diploma with him, to pass for a school-master, he procured the desired information; but his boat failed to meet him. A British boat answered the signal, and his notes, written in Latin, exposed him. He was taken to New York on that eventful twenty-first of September, when five hundred of its buildings were burned; was summarily tried, and executed the next day at the age of twenty-one. His last sentence, when in derision he was allowed to speak as he ascended the gallows, was simply this: ‘I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country.’” He had become a member of Knowlton’s Connecticut Rangers; and the Beekman House and Rutger’s apple orchard, where he was hanged from a tree, located by Lossing near the present intersection of East Broadway and Market streets, were long regarded with interest by visitors in search of localities identified with the Revolutionary period of Washington’s occupation of New York.