there still is, a village called Langensoultz. The region was one of hills
and valleys and of broad, flat meadows yearly overflowed by the Rhine. It
was noted for its fertility; a land of wheat and wine, hop-fields,
flax-fields, hay-stacks, and orchards.

It had been three hundred and seventy years under French rule, yet the
people were still, in speech and traditions, German. Those were not the
times to make them French. The land swept by Napoleon's wars, their
firesides robbed of fathers and sons by the conscription, the awful
mortality of the Russian campaign, the emperor's waning star,
Waterloo--these were not the things or conditions to give them comfort in
French domination. There was a widespread longing among them to seek
another land where men and women and children were not doomed to feed the
ambition of European princes.

In the summer of 1817 there lay at the Dutch port of Helder--for the great
ship-canal that now lets the largest vessels out from Amsterdam was not
yet constructed--a big, foul, old Russian ship which a certain man had
bought purposing to crowd it full of emigrants to America.

These he had expected to find up the Rhine, and he was not disappointed.
Hundreds responded from Alsace; some in Strasburg itself, and many from
the surrounding villages, grain-fields, and vineyards. They presently
numbered nine hundred, husbands, wives, and children. There was one family
named Thomas, with a survivor of which I conversed in 1884. And there was
Eva Kropp, _née_ Hillsler, and her husband, with their daughter of
fifteen, named for her mother. Also Eva Kropp's sister Margaret and her
husband, whose name does not appear. And there were Koelhoffer and his
wife, and Frau Schultzheimer. There is no need to remember exact
relationships. All these except the Thomases were of Langensoultz.