the subsequent history of his countrymen, Johann Conrad Weiser. His
descendants down to our own day have been filling high places in the
history of their country as ministers, teachers, soldiers and statesmen.
His great-grandson was the Speaker of the first House of Representatives
of the United States. Another great-grandson, General Peter Muehlenberg,
was for a time an assistant minister in Zion Church at New Germantown,
N. J. He accepted a call to Woodstock, Virginia, where at the outbreak
of the Revolution he startled his congregation one Sunday by declaring
that the time to preach was past and the time to fight had come.
Throwing off his ministerial robe and standing before them in the
uniform of an American officer, he appealed to them to follow him in the
defence of the liberties of his country. He became a distinguished
officer in the army and subsequently rendered good service in the civil
administration of the new republic.

[illustration: "In the Eighteenth Century"]

A later descendant was Dr. William A. Muhlenberg, born in Philadelphia,
September 16th, 1796, the venerated founder of St. Luke's Hospital in
this city.*
*Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church
of the Holy Communion. He was one of the best beloved ministers in New
York. He died in 1877. I visited him during his last illness in St.
Luke's Hospital. As I took my leave he threw his arms about me and
assured me that he had always been a Lutheran. He evidently conceived of
Lutheranism in broader terms than merely denominational distinctions.

Among the Palatine immigrants stranded on Governor's Island, unable to
follow their sturdier companions to the upper part of the Hudson Valley,
were widows, elderly men and 80 orphans. One of these orphans was Peter