In the pursuit of the real thing that you are seeking for your cue is to travel due east from Hartford. A sybarite would go in no other manner than behind a double team over the splendid road that leads from Hartford to Manchester Green, and thence over the less easy stages of travel beyond. The open carriage and team would probably prove the sybarite's wisdom of self-indulgence in faring over these questionable roads. But for the pilgrim who travels only for the insight, the questionable roads beyond are the mine of experience that at once puts him in sympathy with the character of his subject.

You do not travel miles from the pleasant little hamlet of Manchester Green before you find yourself in the typical Hale country. The evidences of an advanced civilization begin to drop away little by little, until you at last find yourself traveling, with a pleasant labor, over roads that are heavy with sand in summer and which must be well nigh impassable from mud the moment that a less severe storm than an equinox visits them with a downpour. The simple

grandeur of ruggedness begins to take the place of the more elaborate and showy ease of convenience. And the spick and span newness with which the Cheney Brothers have made the Manchesters a model for modern excellence is superseded by the cruder, but to the sympathetic pilgrim, not less pleasant features of the real Connecticut country.

After a while you begin to be impressed with the conviction that you are in the heart of it all. The Tolland county evidences are all around you. The stone fences, the off gleanings of a sterile soil, are the markers of the labor of clearing up a rugged country. And the split rail coadjutors that here and there supplement them as the restrainers. of roving cattle, will more than once remind you of the near approach to the hewn timber posts with the let-down bars that tempt those same cattle into pastures that are but a mouthful of browsing amid a strange mixture of rocks and hardhack, ground pine and huckleberry bushes; or out upon a roadside tangled with briars and laden with the aroma of wild grapes.

The entrance to the Hale country is at Bolton Notch-a mighty cleft in rocks that rise abruptly from the level, their solid granite towering so grandly that giants may have placed them there as rude monuments of their strength. At the base of the hills the New England railroad threads its way through walls that almost bind the trains in their passage, and make their swift flight in summer a brief plunge at mid-day into the cool of evening. Up a carriage road the average Connecticut gigs that toil daily look like toys of antique handiwork crawling over a mammoth turtle's back. When you reach its apex you have left the Notch behind you. It is the Thermopylaean pass to the high levels beyond. It would have attracted an ancient Greek as the pivotal point in a fight for defense. It probably inspired Hale with the lofty patriotism that has made his name a shining one among the names of the Revolutionary heroes. It is when you have passed through this rugged cleft in the rocks, the left hand walls of which rise above you in a protecting menace to danger, that you really feel yourself started. For you are journeying away

from the first lift into the clouds, and toward the long trail of the yellow road that is known as Bolton hill. It will bring you to an altitude where the stretch of the splendid hills, reaching into the distance, makes one the lover of one's country and emphasizes Nathan Hale's last words when pinioned with the cords of his captors.

Just west of the North Coventry meetinghouse you switch sharply to the right. You would not have known the way had not a wayfarer afoot, a native famed for his knowledge of compass bearing and the exact locality of the domiciles of his neighbors for miles around, directed you. When he calls the road that he has indicated as your direction a street, the smatter of urban dialect jars on your ears. But you merely comment on it casually, in earnest of your protest, thank him, and pass on. You are now traveling into a valley. The sun is going down and the mists are gathering. You have loitered. You have mentally understated your distance and overstated your time. So you hurry along in search of the Nathan Hale house with a recollection mixed as to whether

your guide said the first left and the next right or the reverse. The western horizon is lit up with a splendid sunset-an etching of firs and hemlock against a vermilion background that attracts and halts you, and then lingers in your memory as would the scent of roses. The north star is emulating the moon as a light giver. And the odor of wild grapes, emphasized by the evening moisture, fills all the atmosphere with the smell of the vintner's shop, against which the Puritan traditions of Connecticut seem to be entering an insistent protest. No wonder you forget whether it

"Surely, I do not know where he lives." And you close the colloquy, secretly wondering whether your interlocutor is really in earnest or slyly jeering at you. So you hurry along until a half mile further on you see the light of another house, and you knock and ask the same question.

"The first left after you pass the grist mill, the first right beyond and then straight ahead."

You have your sailing papers. You hurry along. But is a league only three miles? It seems like an ocean voyage in length when you are afoot. The stretch

is the right or left road which was indicated as your direction while you stand drinking into your nostrils the bouquet of old wine. So you stop at the first house and inquire:

"Nathan Hale house?" You are greeted with a vacuous stare-a mental straining to give a direction that is wildly impossible. Then the true American whom you are interrogating pulls himself away from his mental gropings and takes refuge in an Irishman's expedient. He asks a question: "Is he a Swede?" "No, he was an American, but he is dead," you answer.

of travel takes you over the low and level land onward. The houses are far apart. And the next one that is reached is only an incentive for the interrogation that is always on the tongue of the traveling stranger.

"Go to the west door, please," is the answer you receive to your summons for attention at the front one. And you go to the west, which proves to be the kitchen door, and put your enquiry to a spare, elderly man.

"Nathan Hale house?" "You mean Peterson's! See that light through the trees? that's it." And the door closes.