between Nathan Hale and Alice Adams
Ripley, no trace of them remains to-day. For this we can only be
grateful that, unlike other unfortunate lovers,--Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett Browing, for instance,--not one word remains of their
correspondence. That belonged to him and to her alone. It is fortunate
that no mere curiosity hunter can feast his eyes or gossip over the
words these two people wrote to each other.

To Alice's husband Nathan's father gave the powder horn she once spoke
of as having seen Nathan working upon in his customary intense fashion,
"doing that one thing as if there was nothing else to be thought of at
that time." Its being given to Mr. Lawrence by Nathan's father, to whom
it must have been dear, proves that Mr. Lawrence, as well as his wife,
was a welcome addition to the Hale family. Mr. Lawrence in turn gave it
to his son William, and it is now treasured by the Connecticut
Historical Society.

Mrs. Lawrence lived well into the nineteenth century, dying in 1845, in
her eighty-ninth year. She was thoroughly appreciated in Hartford, but
it is from the pen of a granddaughter, in a note written to the Hon. I.
W. Stuart, that the best description of Mrs. Lawrence is given. Speaking
of her grandmother she said: "In person she was rather below the middle
height, with full, round figure, rather petite. She possessed a mild,
amiable countenance in which was reflected that intelligent superiority
which distinguished her even in the days of Dwight, Hopkins, and Barlow
in Hartford--men who could appreciate her, who delighted in her wit and
work, and who, with a coterie of others of that period who are still in
remembrance, considered her one of the brightest ornaments of their
society.

"A fair, fresh complexion ... bright, intelligent, hazel eyes, and hair
of a jetty blackness, will give you some idea of her looks--the crowning
glory of which was the forehead that surpassed in beauty any I ever saw,
and was the admiration of my mature years. I portray her, with the
exception of the hair, as she appeared to me in her eighty-eighth year.
I never tired of gazing on her youthful complexion--upon her eyes which
retained their youthful luster unimpaired, and enabled her to read
without any artificial aid; and upon her hand and arm, which, though
shrunken much from age, must in her younger days have been fit study for
a sculptor.

"Her character was everything that was lovely. A lady who had known her