[144] The word translated gingerbread is Pfeffer-kuchen, or pepper-cakes. Pepper-nuts are now made in Lancaster County,—a delicate cake, as I have seen them, somewhat resembling jumbles. If plainer they would be like the New England cookies. Cooky comes from the German kuchen?
In Allentown, a young gentleman tells me that the people of Lehigh County, all through, eat Schwenkfelder-cake. “Our mothers made them for us. They are a kind of vesper-cake, or rusk baked in a loaf.” In Allentown the name is sometimes pronounced Schwinkfelder.
[145] No one should confound these emigrants from the Palatinate with the Palatines for whom William Penn desires the friendship of the Indians. See “[Swiss Exiles],” in this volume. The numerous refugees from the Palatinate probably came from different motives; some for religious freedom, and some to earn their bread. Many German emigrants were redemptionists,—i.e., they sold their time to pay for their voyage. Of this class, we learn, was an ancestor of the late John Covode.
[146] Mr. Weiser tells us, in speaking of the Schwenkfelders, that on a late occasion, having heard that the tombs of their ancestors, near Liegnitz and Gorlitz, were fast being desecrated, and the earth, with their very dust, carried away for road-making purposes, their Pennsylvania posterity collected a handsome sum and forwarded it to the authorities, with a view of purchasing the grounds, and having them set apart and enclosed as the burying-ground of the Silesian Schwenkfelders. It is not believed, however, he adds, that their moneys were appropriated to the laudable end which they had in view.
This narrative might apply to those Silesians who were buried upon the cow-paths (Mr. Weiser says, taken to the carrion pit or bone commons), but does it apply to them after they had taken refuge at Gorlitz?
[147] It has been estimated that ninety-five in one hundred of the Schwenkfelders are farmers.
[148] In the Rules and Ordinances of the Schwenkfelder community may be found this passage: “Yet a Christian places no holiness in wearing the oldest fashioned clothes; he also takes care not quickly to ape all new fashions, much less does he make it his business to bring up new ones.”
[149] Mr. Weiser speaks as if the singing was in the dialect. The following is a copy of some lines which were sung at their meeting-house when I attended, from which the student of German may observe the quality of the language, and the theologian may notice, as it seems to me, two or three of their peculiar doctrines:
“Jehovah, Vater, Sohn, und Geist!
O Segens Bronn, der ewig fleuszt!