A Tale of the Kloster

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n from the seaboard to the Allegheny Mountains. All of the population of the Carolinas, as well as in Virginia and Maryland, entered the country by way of Pennsylvania, and this migration was so great, both in its physical dime

ow such a tide of German immigration, bringing with it many a hardy Swis

ht become a German province. Among the causes of this resistless tide of immigration were: Religious zeal, fostered by the teachings of William Penn and George Fox

a great majority came with the simple desire to earn a livelihood in peace and safety-a desire played upon by the glib-tongued, unscrupulous land agents of that day so successfully, that shipload after shipload of poverty-stricken

upation, profession, personal characteristics, nicknames, names that by a slow but sure process of anglization have lost muc

mass of crude, uncouth peasantry, with their unpronounceable names, besides bearing the brunt of Indian depredation and massacre d

not mercurial brilliancy-piety, industry, patience, thrift, peaceful dispositions, and intense love of home. The men w

are many communities inhabited almost entirely by Pennsylvania-Germans, still retaining their peculiar dial

oroughly English; for however strongly the more conservative ones may cling to the old habits and traditions, it is true that ere long Pennsylvan

g in creed and tenet, and frequently hurling at each other their broadsides, as their controversial pamphlets were called, all these sects were conspicuous for their thrift, industry, and religious devotion; for though many of their beliefs were extremely mystical and, showed every vagary of pietism, one great fundamental idea inspired and possessed these

athered about him a number of zealous men and women, some of them of considerable learning. In less than a decade there arose a semi-monastic community which developed into a religious, educational, commercial, and industria

hing city of Reading and not more than thirteen miles northeast of Lancaster, with its memory of the Co

al establishments, the unfailing accompaniments of these prosaic, unsentimental days, the wide, ancient thoroughfare leads northwestward, the business features giving way to the neat, pleasant, comfortable homes so characteristic of the Pennsylvania-Germans. The houses, with the peculiar feature of their gable ends toward the side instead of facing the street, are well set back in the grassy yards enriched with glorious dahlias in crimson and

rthwestern edge of the town. In the angle formed by the northern bank of the stream and the southern side of the turnpike road, but a short distance beyond the point of the angle where the road leaves the bridge, lie the Kloster grounds, formerly known as "The Settlement of the Solitary" (Lager der Einsamen),

Brotherhood were in the zenith of their little world, and it were well-nigh impossible to reproduce at this late day with absolute fidelity such matters as dress, customs, manners and habits, religious rites and ceremonies; and yet, thanks to the exhaustive investigations of Mr. Sachse and others

German dialects, yet since those days there has been such a copious infusion of English words, that to-day Pennsylvania-German, though "it is still, in the articulation of its bones and its general form and spirit, the tongue of the Rhine country,"[2] is none the less neither Ge

declining dialect with but a small remnant who can speak and understand it in the vernacular, the author feels not only that he should by empl

Germans and spoke the mother tongue in their daily intercourse, yet after all language is on

degroom, were none the less flesh and flood, subject to the same passions and temptations as the men and women of the present day. They too had "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,"

f vain compliment, untutored in the frippery and polish of artificial society, unacquainted with the insincerity and diplomacy

friend, Mr. Sachse. Indeed, to do exact justice, it must be said that this volume contains nothing more than a romance wound about the f

e use of translations, portions of which are prefixed to Chapters XV. and XIX. It should also be added that the initial letters used th

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