The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-02-24

: $1 100. In April, 1892, at a Philadelphia ] sale, letter sold for SLIPS. Another 1 document in this sale of more than ordi-
 nary interest was Nathan Hale's com mission as captain in Colonel Webb s regiment of volunteers, raised, as the l commission states, flor the defense of American liberty and for the repelllng every hostile invasion thereof" This | bears the date of January i, 1776, is signed by John Hancock. and endorsed | by Hale. It sold for S1,775. All of these l Hale letters are in private collections, | The Connecticut Historical Society, in | Hartford, owns the most valuable man. uscript of all, Nathan Hale's journal, a brief but interesting account or daily
 camp life from September il. '75, to Au- gust F, '76. The Connecticut Historical
 Society has also many letters written l to Hale from his friends in New Lon
 don, and some of his camp utensils.
 It was from the journal that I. w. Stuart gathered a large part of his in- i formation for his Life of Captain Ma than Hale,' published in Hartford in 1856 The Lenox Library possesses a
 copy of this book formerly owned by the historian, George Bancroft, and it is of
 particular interest, because an auto-
 graph letter is inserted from William
 Roderick Lawrense to Bancroft, giving
 some details of Alice Adams, the wo-
 man to whom the young patriot had
 been engaged. She died in Hartford
 September f. 1845, at the age of SS years
 The author of the letter referred to was
 her grandson. The letter was written
 from Hartford, January 23, 1856, and
 says among other things:
 T will tell you more than you will
 find in the volume Stuart's Life of
 Hale, being considered of rather too
 full. When she was IA or 15 years of
 age, a mere schoolgirl, Hale was in
 college and they even then kept up
 correspondence, but her mother, finding
 it out, caused her to give up Hales letters, which she destroyed, saying she was too young to know anything about such matters. They then persuaded her to marry MT. Ripley, a thriving mer- chant of the place, when she was but Is years of age, and ii was considered an excellent match. He died, leaving
 her widow at IS, with one child, which lived about ayear, and followed it's father. She then returned to Hale's father, and lived under one roof. Hale returned home, renewed his at tention, and then, and not before, they were betrothed, and it was well un- derstood by all relatives and friends that their marriage was to take place, but he left her to serve his country, and bn 1-r 1,ny thus particular, thinking it might in- terest you. After she was quite ad vanced, over 80, if I referred to Hale, her eyes would sparkle and light up with luster, and she would begin to tell how handsome he was, and comment on his rare qualities, even when her mind was so far gone that she would forget what was told her five minutes previous
 Hale's father marrier for his second wife, the young lady's mother, Abigail Adams, a widow SO that explains why she went to live with them after the death of her first husband.
 No truthful likeness of Nathan Hale is known to exist. MacMonnies' statue in City Hall Park is the finest ever erected to his memory. It was un- yelled under the auspices of the Sons of the Revolution, November y5, 1893. The first Hale monument erected was in 1S46, when a granite shaft forty-five feet high was placed in the church. yard at Coventry, Conn. In 1887, statue, designed by Karl Gerhardt, was in the State Capitol at Hart ford, and in the spring of 1893 another Hale statue was presented to Hartford by a prominent citizen, and was placed in front of the Wadsworth Athanaeum This was the work of a Hartford sclup- tor, 10. S. Woods-F. w. C., in New York Evening Post.