of discovery and capture in such a situation. But for a year I have been attached to the army, and have not rendered any material service, while receiving a compensation for which I make no return. Yet I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service, necessary for the public good, becomes honorable by being necessary. If the exigencies of my country demand a peculiar service, its claims to the performance of that service are imperious."

He reported to Washington, and received from him full and particular instructions. He was to penetrate the enemy's camp, learn all the details of his positions and defenses, and observe all the indications which could unveil the mystery of his contemplated movements. He proceeded by land up the Sound as far as Norwalk, where he engaged an armed sloop to carry him across to Huntington Bay, and to be on the look-out for his return. He assumed the dress and character of a schoolmaster, in which he could deport himself with due fidelity. He left behind him all tokens of his real station, and only took his college diploma, as an auxiliary to his assumed character. He landed before daybreak at "the Cedars," on Great Neck. From this time till his capture, but little is known of his movements. He penetrated the enemy's lines, made drawings of his works, with descriptive Latin notes, and, indeed, fully succeeded in the main object of his mission. After his departure, Howe had landed at Kip's Bay, and Clinton had thrown a cordon across New York Island, "between the seventh and eighth milestone." Hale succeeded in crossing to New York. examining the newlyassumed stations, and again crossing to Long Island. He made his way back to "the Cedars," where his expected boat was to receive him. This not being there, it would appear that he ventured into a tory rendezvous called "Mother Clitch's tavern," where one story says he was recognized by a person who conveyed the intelligence to the British guard-ship, Halifax, lying near by. A barge approached which he unfortunately mistook for the one he was expecting. He walked down deliberately to meet it, when his mistake was made apparent by the crew suddenly standing up, levelling their mus

sur

kets at him, and ordering him to " render or die." They were so near at hand that any escape seemed hopeless, and he could only resign himself to his fate. His real character seems not to have been known; but the military plans and descriptive notes, found in his pumps, pretty clearly indicated the truth. All the circumstances seemed suspicious. Capt. Quarme of the Halifax, when the boat brought Hale on board, became convinced he was a spy. and dispatched him with the evidences of his assumed character, in a boat of the Halifax, to New York. He afterwards, with a touch of generosity, then too rare in the British service, expressed his regrets, "that so fine a fellow should have fallen into his hands."

The twenty-first of September, 1776, was a day to be remembered in New York. From Whitehall to Barclay street, a conflagration raged along both sides of Broadway, in which 493 houses, or about one-third of the city, was laid in ashes. The College green and a change of wind only arrested the swift destruction. On the same day, the dignified, harsh, cold, and courtly Howe had his head-quarters in the Beekman house (now standing at the corner of Fifty-first street and First Avenue), on the East river, about three and a quarter miles from the Park. The conflagration, checked but not subdued, still clouded the air, when a generous youth, of high intelligence, kindly manners. and noble character, was brought into the presence of this stern dignitary. That youth was charged with being a spy, and the allegation was substantiated by some military sketches and notes, found on his person. In this court of last resort, Hale dropped all disguises, and at once proclaimed himself an American officer, and a spy. He attempted no plea of extenuation, he promised no transfer of allegiance, he besought no pardoning clemency. He waited calmly, and with no unmanly fears, the too evident sentence which was to snap his brittle thread of life. Howe kept him not long in waiting, but at once wrote a brief precept, giving to William Cunningham, Provost Marshal of the Royal Army, the care and custody of the body of Nathan Hale, Captain in the rebel army, this day convicted as a spy, and directing him to see that he be hung by the neck until dead, "to-morrow morning at daybreak."

Submitting ourselves to the guidance of the most authentic evidences, we must suppose that Hale was removed at once, for his one remaining night, to the old Provost, which is the present Hall of Records, in the Park. It is difficult to conceive a night of greater distress, or more thronged with memories, endurances, and anticipations. Never was prison presided over by a more insatiate monster than this Cunningham. All the surroundings were of the most forbidding aspect. The coming morning was to conduct the prisoner, through unspeakable contumely, to the portals of eternity. He calmly asked, that his hands might be loosed, and that a light and writing materials might be supplied, to enable him, for the last time, to write to his parents and friends. Cunningham denied the request! Hale asked for the use of a Bible, and even this was savagely refused. Thank God, there was one there with enough the heart and feelings of a man, to be roused to energetic remonstrance by such malignant inhumanity. The lieutenant of Hale's guard earnestly and successfully besought that these requests should be granted. In the silent hours, so swiftly bearing him on to the verge of his dear and happy life, the strong soul of the martyr was permitted to write for loved eyes its parting message. On came the swift and fatal morning, and with it came the diabolical Cunningham, greedy to luxuriate in another's woe. Hale handed him the letters he had written; Cunningham at once read them, and, growing furious at their high spirit, tore them to pieces before the writer's eyes. He afterwards gave as his reason, "that the rebels should never know they had a man who could die with so much firmness."

Of course, reader, you are accustomed to do shopping now and then at Stewart's marble palace, and to ache with comedy at inimitable Burton's. You are familiar with the ceaseless ebb and flow of the human tide which overwhelms that crowded precinct. Had you stood where Burton now rules the kingdom of mirth, on the early morn of September 22d, 1776, you would have seen a tragedy such as no tears could have washed from your memory. You would have seen a human brother who, having endured his Gethsemane, there suffered on his Calvary. You would have seen his youthful face transfigured. VOL. VII.-31

with the calm peace of a triumphant martyr. A life, suffused with religious sensibilities, and blooming with holy love, then and there culminated. You would have seen, too, a being utterly depraved and reprobate. Had Satan come to earth to act as hangman, he would have had too much taste and gentility to have appeared as Cunningham. This monster had mixed arsenic in the flour for his prisoners, to save or steal their rations. He delighted, from sheer malice, to threaten the excellent Dr. Mathew with a speedy hanging. He murdered his prisoners near the prison yard, “five or six of them of a night,” till "certain women in the neighborhood, pained by the cries for mercy which they heard, went to the Commander-in-Chief and made the case known." To call his prisoners "dogs," "rebel spawn," and to drive them to their 'kennels," was the recreation of the Provost Marshal of the Royal Army. Confronted by this representative of His Majesty, cheered by no voice of friendship or even of sympathy, beset by the emblems and ministers of ignominious death, Hale stood on the fatal spot. The ritual of disgrace had been performed, and a single refinement of malice was all that even Cunningham's ingenuity had in reserve--he demanded "a dying speech and confession." Humanity had begun to assert itself in the crowd of curious gazers, for pity was swelling up in many hearts, and finding expression in stifled sobs. Firm and calm, glowing with purification and selfsacrifice, Hale seemed to gather up his soul from out his body, as, with solemn emphasis, he gave answer to this last demand of malignity:-"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

One more responsive surge of diabolic fury, and a heroic spirit confronts the unveiled mysteries of eternity. Perhaps when you again shop at Stewart's, or laugh at Burton's, you may ask, "Where rest the bones of this brave man?" Alas! we cannot tell! Perhaps they are under that comic stage; for near there they were probably buried.

Honest Tunis Bogart, a witness of Hale's execution, said: "I have never been able to efface the scene of horror from my mind-it rises up to my imagination always." Ashur Wright, who was Hale's personal attendant, was so

completely overwhelmed by his fate, that his understanding reeled from its throne, never to be fully reinstated. There was such lamentation among relatives, friends, and brother officers, as betokened how dear this young hero had grown. The memory of the man has been reverently cherished in quiet places. The admiration of a later generation has hewn a granite monument to his memory, which stands in his native town, silent and sad, among ancestral graves. A faithful and loving biographer has now reared a monument, which will carry to many young hearts the unction of patriotic devotion. Thanks and our special acknowledgment to this welltimed chronicler. The name of Hale is not destined to be forgotten while patriotism is esteemed a virtue.

Perhaps there are some who think Hale was really dishonored because he was hung as a spy. To any such we would say, that the measure of infamy shifts incessantly from age to age. No unit of conventional dishonor is fixed or lasting. The very insignia of infamy in one age, become the honored regalia of another. The cross, reserved for ignominious malefactors in old Judea, is now the chosen emblem of all that is exalted and soul-inspiring throughout Christendom. Not a few of the noblest escutcheons ought to bear as decorations the gallows, the guillotine, the garrote, or some of the innumerable instruments of tortured and dishonored death. The externals of attainting manifestation will have ever less and less value, except as they may aid to interpret the endurance of suffering souls. It may, perhaps, be a true rule, that no imputed ignominy will survive as such which is not still ignominy when tested by the most exalted Christian standards.

So far as human conventionalities could achieve an unsanctified purpose, Nathan Hale died an ignominious death, and was consigned to infamy. But his name is not a word of infamy, and all the power of British arms cannot make it so. His high, actuating motives rise in solemn majesty before us, and make

the gallows-the rogue's march, the mean persecution of insults, and all the machinery of disgrace-significant only of surrounding baseness, and of his own internal strength. His death proved what his life had only indicated. It showed in him a true heroic greatness, which could, in calm dignity. endure to die wronged and unasserted. The common pathway to glory is trodden with comparative ease; but to go down to the grave, high-spirited but insulted, technically infamous, unfriended in the last great agony, with an all-absorbing patriotism, baffled and anxious, and burning for assurance of his country's ultimate triumph-thus to have done and borne in unfaltering dignity, was the ultimate criterion and evidence of a genuine nobility of nature. Had this sharp ordeal been spared, the man's strong, true spirit might have remained ever unrecognized.

A certain share of infamy attaches to Howe, on account of the barbarities of Hale's execution. He could and should have known that Cunningham was a devil, unfit for any earthly trust. He should, too, have observed the due formality of a court-martial, and he certainly should have taken care to have the sentence executed in decency. War, however mitigated by humane observances, has enough of atrocity without superadding any brutalities of slovenly trials and cannibal concomitants to its stern sentences. Howe is deeply blame-worthy for his lack of humanity, and for his unrestrained indulgence of such monsters as this Provost Marshal. military distinction can atone for the stigma of wickedness which our common humanity affixes to one who even omits to cultivate the humanities of war. Howe stands convicted of a tolerance of demoniac cruelty, not only in this case, but in the prison ships, and in his general administration. There is something even more damning in being an ungenerous enemy than in being an ungenerous friend. This condemnation rests firmly on the name of Howe.

No

THE frigate picked up her anchors out

of the waters of the Gulf of Spezia, and, with dallying summer breezes, we stood along the coast towards southern Italy.

Leaving Elba and Monte Christo on our right-the spot so graphically painted as the scene of the hobgoblin exploits of the count of that name, by his veracious biographer, M. Dumasand, with a distant view of the Tiber and Campagna of Rome, we slowly sailed over the flat, warm sea, until one night the sluggish ship stood still, within the gigantic breakwater of Ischia, at the mouth of the Bay of Naples.

The moon came timidly up over the steep cliffs of Capri, and shed her soft, white light upon the magnificent panorama of land and water around us. The frigate lay becalmed. scarcely moving an inch from beneath the terraced shade of the high peaks of Ischia. The solid hull was too deep below the surface, her taper masts and canvas were too high in the heavens, and both were too rapt in beholding the scene around and the wonders below the bay, to give heed to the furtive fluttering airs, laden with the perfume of orange blossoms, which came stealthily off from the land.

From the castle-crowned rock of Procida to Baix, the curving sweep of the bay begins; and the city, with its dense masses of white buildings, rises in amphitheatre-like ranges, until capped by the gloomy fortress of St. Elmo; then beyond is the great dome of Vesuvius-a thin puff of white smoke, toying and eddying around the crater, occasionally lurid with flame from the seething, red, molten lava within the volcano's broad and burning flanks; while on the eye insensibly wanders towards the east, where the sharp-cut peaks stand guard above Castellamare and Sorrento, until the panorama is nearly closed by the bluff cape and the gap of blue sea which separates it from the precipitous island of Capri.

And now out here, in the lovely Italian night, in this paradise of the poets and painters, let us hold a conseil de mer upon our campaigns for the future.

"My good sir," I would begin by observing, or, “Bless your heart, miss, I

pray you not to come all the way here to be worried and oppressed out of your natural good sense by striving to see all the world at one peep; or to take a flying vault over one wonder, or the top of another, solely because legions of other trifling, wonder-loving people have accomplished the feat before you. Don't allow your precious wits to be confused, because the great rhymers and sculptors, from the times of the old Athenians, the Homers, and Phidiases, down to our day, have written sublime verse, or carved in marble, or portrayed on canvas, miracles and master-pieces of song and art; or because Corinne has charmed this one, or Consuelo turned the head of that one, with their meretricious, insidious immorality; or because Rogers has warbled sweet descriptions, and Starke-may Heaven be merciful to that old lady, now that she is at rest in the Campo Santo-and Murray, the insatiable for whom there is no future rest-have exhausted the entire heathen mythology, mixed up with the price of washing and beefsteaks, merely to convince, nay, bully you, as to how, when, and where you must go, look, or eat, so as properly to appreciate what, in their opinions, constitute the beauties of Italy. Oh no, my hearers. I beseech you to jog gently about, like selfdependent mortals, relying upon the faculties Providence has vouchsafed you; tarry or journey by the highways or goat-paths; repose or fatigue yourself; eat rarioli; suck oranges; smell flowers; drink sour wine or sweet, as best agrees with your constitution; pitch all guides and cicerones to the Diavolo-which will only forestall their fate a little-and then, having cleared your skirts of the vermin, and the film from your eyes, you may live like a prince-indeed, far better than most of the race-enjoy the delights which nature spreads, broadcast, before youhave health, pleasure, and good cheer, all by following the bent of your own inclinations."

And now, my friends, if you like, we will go on shore, and take an inside look at Naples.

In the morning, the sea-breeze wafted us to the anchorage abreast the arsenal.

It is not, by the way, a position where King Bomba prefers to gaze upon ships of war, since their guns stare full in at his palace windows.

In less than an hour, a peripatetic artist in a boat had painted the frigate in colored chalks, with a back-ground, comprising the most awful eruption of Vesuvius ever beheld since the days of Pliny. Punch and Judy were screeching and wrangling in the most agonizing tones on either side of us. A boat-load of charlatans and ballet-tumblers, of both sexes, were jabbering under the stern. A small imp, without any visible legs, beneath the cabin windows, was making music by hammering away with his knuckles on his lower jaw, keeping up a snap-accompaniment to a whistling chorus. Crowds of itinerant venders of precious relics, coral ornaments, lavas, and piles of daubs of pictures, were thick as bees around the ship, all striving to get up a little code of friendly signals with the officers on deck, or sentries at the gangways, so as to be admitted on board.

I went on shore in the cool of the afternoon; wound my way towards the Villa Reale, and entered the Vittoria Hotel. This albergo was, in former times, and is now, the grandest in Naples. I myself, once upon a time, picked up within the precincts of this establishment a handkerchief, belonging to that good old Dowager Queen Adelaide; which, in itself, was enough to stamp the respectability of the house. Upon the strength of this knowledge, I had advised some of my un-Italianized messmates to bivouac there, and thus give the frigate a good name.

The polite porter showed me up several pianos of stairs, until I had gained an altitude about as high as our main-top-gallant-yard, when I was ushered into a pretty saloon, and welcomed by my friends. They were at table, enjoying themselves greatly, after the long Mediterranean sea voyage we had endured. of four days.

The dinner was excellent; the very chickens seemed happy even in death. Small vegetables were coming and going, until, at last, all made way for the fruit.

Apricots, with their downy cheeks half hidden in the green leaves of their purple neighbors, the figs; cherries were heaped up in rich, luscious, red masses; a pyramid of oranges rose

above all; while in every vacant space there stood ruby or pale wine in flasksFalernian, Ischia, and the petit Bordeaux of Capri. Cigar-smoke curled gracefully over this little feast, and it was a picture of downright enjoyment. I was shown through the suit of apartments, too; admired the finely-gilded and painted walls and ceilings; the richly marble-tiled floors; the damasked-curtained beds; the magnificent furniture and the pictures; and then I hung over the lofty balconies, and let my eyes drink in the animated loveliness of the bay.

In a little while, carriages were announced, and, attended by a horde of boy beggars, we formed the queue, with the beau monde of the city, and whirled dustily along the Chiaja for the evening drive. We went through the long, stifling tunnel of Posilippo; rolled on by the road to Baiæ; took a couple of turns again on the Chiaja, and then descended for a walk in the Royal Garden, designed by Murat. We were all blinded and powdered by dust, and that of the nastiest and most disagreeable kind; and we were wearied by the throngs of podgy priests, who darkened the sidewalks, like daws in a rookery. After a saunter beneath the dense and pretty avenues, around the marble fountains and statues, we took an ice at an al fresco café, and I then bade adieu to my companions. I deem it, however, candid to mention, that, on the following day, a mutual acquaintance called upon them at the Grand Hotel, and discovered that they had levanted in a body, soon after breakfast, and later in the day were found to be taking a frugal repast, at an obscure caravanserai near the mole, having been, it was premised, thoroughly cleaned out during their brief sojourn at the Vittoria.

During our stay at Naples, I had the honor of making the acquaintance of Count Bambozzi. I may here remark, that the general ruck of Neapolitan nobility is not a society much to be sought after. As a class, they are numerous, and, not uncommonly, needy. I call to mind, many years ago, a gentleman of this description, who, after informing me that he was a cousin to the Prince of Syracuse, the half brother of the king, received some considerable attention on board the ship I was in. On visiting and inspecting the galley, he inquired where the stalwart old negro cook