Norwalk where he had originally landed. Rendered perhaps too bold by
success, he went into a well-known and popular tavern, entered into
conversation with the guests, and made himself very agreeable. The
tradition is that he made himself too agreeable. A man present
suspecting or knowing that he was not the character he had assumed,
quietly left the room, communicated his suspicions to the captain of a
British ship anchored near, who dispatched a boat's crew to capture and
bring on board the agreeable stranger. His true character was
immediately revealed. Drawings of some of the British works, with notes
in Latin, were found hidden in the soles of his shoes. Nor did he
attempt to deceive his captors, and the English captain, lamenting, as
he said, that "so fine a fellow had fallen into his power," sent him to
New York in one of his boats, and with him the fatal proofs that he was
a spy.

September twenty-first was the day on which he reached New York--the day
of the great fire which laid one-third of the little city in ashes. From
the time of his departure from General Washington's camp to that of his
return to New York was about fourteen days. He was taken to General
Howe's headquarters at the Beekman mansion, on the East River, near the
corner of the present Fifty-first Street and First Avenue. It is a
strange coincidence that this house to which he was brought to be tried
as a spy was the very one from which Major Andre departed when he went
to West Point. Tradition says that Captain Hale was examined in a
greenhouse which then stood in the garden of the Beekman mansion.

Short was his trial, for he avowed at once his true character. The
British general signed an order to his provost-marshal directing him to
receive into his custody the prisoner convicted as a spy, and to see him
hanged by the neck "to-morrow morning at daybreak."