iety's centennial
anniversary on July 27, 1853.

Timothy Dwight, the first of that name to be president of Yale College,
was, like Nathan Hale, a descendant of Elder Strong who founded
Northampton, Massachusetts. Dwight graduated in 1769, the year Hale
entered college. He then became a tutor and was a personal friend of
Hale's. He was a teacher of extraordinary power and was made president
of Yale in 1795. He was one of the most remarkable men of his time,
molding the moral and religious, as well as intellectual, character of
the college so that his influence extended not only over the whole state
but, to a great degree, over the whole United States. He was a fine
illustration of the great abilities that centered in so many of the
leading families of the colonists. Such connections as this man add even
a higher luster to the genealogy of Elizabeth Strong Hale, and lessen
our wonder that a son of hers, while hardly more than a boy, could face
the duty and calmly accept the responsibility that he felt rested upon
him.

As may easily be inferred, the Hale boys, Enoch and Nathan, were not
forgotten by their home friends while making honorable records in
college, and forming pleasant friendships outside the college
walls--then the happy lot of all the best men in college--among the
cultured families of what was then a small New England city.

An instance of the friendships Nathan made in New Haven is shown by the
words of AEneas Munson, M.D., formerly of that city. When an aged man he
spoke in the warmest terms of Hale's fine qualities as he observed them
when he was a boy in his father's house, and he treasured a letter to
his father from Hale in 1774 which will be given farther on.

Of home letters, happily a few from their father in Coventry to his two
sons in college are still preserved; these prove, as no words of any
stranger could, his constant and practical interest in all that
concerned them. They show us how an upright father tried to influence
his boys' religious characters while distant from them, and at the same
time they show the economies which even well-to-do fathers then had to
exercise in providing for their sons while at college. The first letter
also shows that Nathan must have entered college when fourteen years and
three months old, having been born in June, 1755, and entering college
in September, 1769. We here give the first letter, with all its quaint
old spelling, and after it two others written