ick, furloughed, and on command; and those neither armed
nor clothed as they should be. In short, my situation has been
such, that I have been obliged to conceal it from my own officers.

The second letter was written to Congress:

To make men well acquainted with the duties of a soldier, requires
time. To bring them under proper discipline and subordination, not
only requires time, but is a work of great difficulty; and in this
army where there is so little distinction between officers and
soldiers, requires an uncommon degree of attention. To expect,
then, the same service from raw and undisciplined recruits, as from
veteran soldiers, is to expect what never did, and perhaps never
will happen.

On the 23d of December, 1775, Hale began his first and only trip to
Connecticut for the sake of securing additional enlistments. If on this
one visit home he became engaged--as some have believed--to the woman he
had so long loved, now a widow of about nineteen, Alice Adams Ripley, we
may infer that love brightened his embassy even though patriotism
inspired it. No record remains of the glorified hours he may have spent
in Coventry. We have good reason to believe that, if he survived the
war, he expected to marry the woman he had so faithfully loved. After a
few brief days in his home, he left it, never to return, speeding on his
way to serve his country's needs.

If this new zest entered his life at this time, we can easily imagine as
he fared on, striving to arouse his countrymen to their duty as
patriots, that the happiest hours of his life were urging him forward to
the most perfect service he could render in the present, and to
unlimited hopes and ambitions for the future he might well expect was
awaiting him. Crowned by human love, and with unlimited opportunities to
serve his country, who can tell by what "vision splendid" he was "on his
way attended"? Who can help rejoicing that such days, brief as they
were, and uplifting as they must have been, were given to this man, now
past twenty?

Details concerning that trip are scanty. We know for a certainty that,
starting from camp December 23, 1775, he returned to it the last week in
January, 1776, having been in New London and other places seeking
recruits, and going back with the recruits he himself had secured,
joined by others coming from the various towns in Connecticut, and all
heading toward the camp around Boston