Chapter IV

A Call To Arms

The place "allotted" to him was that of lieutenant
in the third company of the yth Connecticut
regiment, commanded by Colonel Charles Webb.
No doubt exists that Lieutenant Nathan Hale was
the same Nathan Hale who had won distinction in
all his college work, in his subsequent teaching, and
in all the events thus far associated with his early
manhood, with this difference; he was now lifted
to a line of service that in his opinion seemed the
highest possible for him to follow, and no one
who studies his subsequent course can question
that in this following he found the loftiest consecration
thus far possible to him. Perhaps unconsciously
he was to verify the poet's assertion,

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, 7 caw."

With no trace of merely personal ambition, but
with that splendid power of absorption in duty as

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v?