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The Letters±
of
Mary Penry
a single mor av ian woman

in early a merica
the letters of mary penry
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd i 5/1/18 3:59 PM

editor
Craig D. Atwood
Director of the Center for Moravian Studies, Moravian Seminary
Volumes in the Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies Series take

multidisciplinary approaches to the history and theology of these
groups and their religious and cultural influence around the globe. The
series seeks to enrich the dynamic international study of post-
Reformation Protestantism through original works of scholarship.
advisory board
Bill Leonard, Wake Forest University

Katherine Faull, Bucknell University
A. G. Roeber, Penn State University
Jonathan Strom, Emory University
Hermann Wellenreuther, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Rachel Wheeler, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd ii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

edited by scott paul gordon
THE LETTERS OF
MARY PENRY
A Single Moravian Woman in Early America
The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd iii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

Letters held in the Penralley Collection used by permission of Llyfrgell
Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales and the Rhayader
Museum and Gallery (CARAD). Letters held at the Historical Society
of Pennsylvania; Jacobsburg Historical Society; Library Company of
Philadelphia; Linden Hall Archives; Moravian Archives, Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania; Moravian Archives, Winston-Salem, North Carolina;
and Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University,
used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Penry, Mary, 1735–1804, author. | Gordon, Scott Paul, 1965– editor.
Title: The letters of Mary Penry : a single Moravian woman in early America
/ edited by Scott Paul Gordon.
Other titles: Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist studies.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State
University Press, [2018] | Series: Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist
studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “A collection of letters by Mary Penry (1735–1804), who
immigrated to America from Wales and lived in Moravian communities
for more than forty years. Offers a sustained view of the spiritual and
social life of a single woman in early America”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007931 | ISBN 9780271081083 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Penry, Mary, 1735–1804—Correspondence. |
Moravian women—Pennsylvania—Correspondence. | Single women—
Pennsylvania—Correspondence. | Moravians—Pennsylvania—Social life
and customs—18th century. | Moravians—Pennsylvania—Social life
and customs—19th century. | Single women—Pennsylvania—Social life
and customs—18th century. | Single women—Pennsylvania—Social life
and customs—19th century.
Classification: LCC BX8593.P46 A4 2018 | DDC 284/.6092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007931
Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802–1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association

of University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free

paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd iv 5/1/18 3:59 PM

contents
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi
Genealogical Charts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii
Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xix
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Letters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
1. To the Congregation, 1755 (33)
2. To Polly Gordon, May 5, 1759 (35)
3. To Relatives in Wales, July 13, 1760 (36)
4. To Unknown, [1760] (39)
5. To Polly Gordon, March 1, 1762 (41)
6. To Friedrich von Marschall, July 19, 1763 (42)
7. To Friedrich von Marschall, August 9, 1765 (45)
8. To Polly Gordon, August 25, 1765 (47)
9. To Nathanael Seidel, October 13, 1766 (48)
10. To Nathanael Seidel, October 30, 1766 (51)
11. To Nathanael Seidel, December 1, 1767 (52)
12. To Joseph Powell and Martha Powell, March 20, 1768 (54)
13. To Joseph Powell and Martha Powell, April 25, 1768 (55)
14. To Joseph Powell and Martha Powell, June 3, 1768 (56)
15. To Joseph Powell and Martha Powell, March 5, 1770 (57)
16. To Mary Shippen, October 17, 1774 (59)
17. To Polly Roberts, September 23, 1780 (60)
18. To Elizabeth Drinker, October 23, 1783 (61)
19. To Johann Andreas Huebner, April 16, 1784 (63)
20. To Catherine Wistar, August 12, 1786 (64)
21. To Catherine Wistar, September 18, 1786 (66)
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vi contents
22. To Catherine Wistar, November 3, 1786 (68)

23. To Catherine Haines, November 3, 1786 (70)
24. To Elizabeth Drinker, March 29, 1788 (72)
25. To Elizabeth Drinker, August 9, 1788 (74)
26. To Elizabeth Drinker, November 26, 1790 (76)
27. To Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1791 (77)
28. To Francis Alison, July 1, 1792 (80)
29. To Meredith Penry and Katherine Penry, May 2, 1793 (81)
30. To Meredith Penry and Katherine Penry, May 20, 1793 (83)
31. To Meredith Penry and Katherine Penry, June 4, 1793 (86)
32. To John Gambold, October 4, 1793 (88)
33. To Meredith Penry, Katherine Penry, and Eliza Powell,
February 3, 1794 (90)
35. To Meredith Penry and Katherine Penry,
September 21, 1794 (95)
36. To Meredith Penry and Katherine Penry, March 5, 1795 (97)
July 2, 1795 (100)
October 20, 1795 (112)
39. To Elizabeth Drinker, December 5, 1795 (114)
40. To Elizabeth Drinker, February 2, 1796 (116)
41. To Meredith Penry, April 27, 1796 (117)
42. To Katherine Penry, April 28–30, 1796 (128)
43. To Eliza Powell, May 1, 1796 (141)
44. To Elizabeth Drinker, August 5, 1796 (149)
October 2, 1796 (153)
46. To Meredith Penry, March 9, 1797 (156)
47. To Katherine Penry, March 10, 1797 (160)
48. To Eliza Powell, March 10, 1797 (166)
49. To Elizabeth Drinker, April 2, 1797 (172)
50. To Elizabeth Drinker, May 6, 1797 (177)
November 11, 1797 (178)
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contents vii

53. To Meredith Penry, November 17, 1798 (184)
54. To Katherine Penry, November 17, 1798 (191)
55. To Eliza Powell, November 17, 1798 (194)
56. To Elizabeth Drinker, December 19, 1799 (198)
57. To Meredith Penry, May 23, 1800 (203)
58. To Benjamin Rush, June 26, 1800 (208)
59. To James Birkby, October 1800 (209)
60. To Elizabeth Drinker, April 3, 1801 (210)
61. To Benjamin Rush, April 25, 1801 (216)
62. To Elizabeth Drinker, June 14–22, 1801 (217)
63. To Elizabeth Drinker, August 30–31, 1801 (220)
64. To Katherine Penry and Eliza Powell, October 23, 1801 (223)
65. To Benjamin Rush, January 23, 1802 (228)
66. To Elizabeth Drinker, February 6–8, 1802 (229)
67. To Benjamin Rush, March 11, 1802 (234)
68. To Katherine Penry, July 10, 1802 (237)
69. To Eliza Powell, July 10, 1802 (242)
70. To Georg Heinrich Loskiel, September 28, 1802 (246)
71. To Katherine Penry, September 29, 1803 (247)
72. To Eliza Powell, September 29–October 15, 1803 (251)
73. To [Margaret Stocker], January 21, 1804 (255)
74. To Margaret Stocker, May 8, 1804 (255)
Appendix A: Mary Penry’s Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

Appendix B: Mary Attwood’s Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Appendix C: The Stocker and
Drinker Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .271
Appendix D: Business Correspondence . . . . . . . . . . . .275
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
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19140-Gordon_Letters.indd viii 5/1/18 3:59 PM
illustrations
1 Bethlehem, 1757, by Nicholas Garrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 Abersenny, Defynnog, Wales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
3 Lititz, with single sisters sisters’ house, 1809, by Samuel Reincke . . . . . . . . 14
4 Lititz single sisters’ financial account, May 1771 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
5 Lititz single sisters’ membership catalog, 1780. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
6 Letter from Mary Penry to Joseph Powell and Martha Powell,
June 3, 1768. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
7 Lititz single sisters’ diary, April and May 1804 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd ix 5/1/18 3:59 PM

19140-Gordon_Letters.indd x 5/1/18 3:59 PM
acknowledgments
This volume would be impossible without the generosity of the institutions

that possess Penry’s letters: the Rhayader Museum and the National Library
of Wales, the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem and in Winston-Salem, the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia,
the Jacobsburg Historical Society, the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Duke University, the Joseph Downs Collection of
Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera at Winterthur, and Linden Hall in
Lititz. At Linden Hall, archivist Joey Yocum and assistant archivist Kate
Yeager were especially generous with their time, as were four volunteers at
the Lititz Moravian Church Archives: Marian Shatto, Tom Wentzel, Nancy
Sandercox, and Bob Sandercox. I wish Bob could see this volume.
Invitations to present the Moravian Historical Society’s Annual Meeting
Lecture in 2012 and the Jeanette Barres Zug Lecture in 2014 provided oppor-
tunities to talk about Mary Penry to engaged audiences who asked superb
questions. Those lectures appeared in the Journal of Moravian History and in
The Hinge, and I thank the editors of both publications for letting me use
previously published material in the introduction to this volume.
I am grateful to Edward Quinter for translating material for this volume;
to Monica Najar, Linda Yankaskas, and Jeremy Zallen for critiquing a draft
of the introduction; to Jennifer Lewis for digging in Welsh records for infor-
mation about Penry’s genealogy; to Louise Benson James for touring me
around Wales on a beautiful spring Friday; to Lehigh University’s Lawrence
Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies for financial sup-
port; to the readers for Pennsylvania State University Press, whose sugges-
tions have improved this volume substantially; and to Kathryn Yahner of
Pennsylvania State University Press, with whom it has been a true pleasure
to work.
I thank Katie Faull, Dashielle Horn, Dawn Keetley, Jeffrey Long, Seth
Moglen, Monica Najar, Christina Petterson, Heather Reinert, Megan van
Ravenswaay, and Lanie Yaswinksi for conversations over many years that
helped shape this volume. I owe profound debts to Craig Atwood, who urged
me to submit this manuscript to the series he edits; to Tom McCullough,
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xi 5/1/18 3:59 PM

xii acknowledgments
assistant archivist at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, who helped me in

more ways and more often than I can recall; and especially to Paul Peucker,
the archivist in Bethlehem, who supported this project at every stage of its
life, when it was new and when (I imagine) it began to seem old. Nobody
endured more conversations about this project than did James Dinh. For his
encouragement—in all things—I am very lucky.
My parents, Lois Gordon (1927–2016) and Melvin Gordon (1925–2014),
did not live to see this volume in print. Both offered, for fifty years, unquali-
fied support and encouragement in whatever I chose to do. I dedicate this
volume, with love and gratitude, to them.
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

genealogical charts
PENRY GENEALOGY
HUGH PENRY OF ABERSENNY m.  ELINOR PENRY

d.  d. 
JAMES m. BRIDGET SMALL

– d. 
THOMAS
SISTER
–
(unnamed, elder to Mary,
lived two months, b. unknown)
HUGH m.  MARY STOCKER
– – MARY PENRY
–
CHARLES
b. 
CHARLES
b. 
KATHERINE
–
MARGERY unm.
b. 
HUGH
–
MEREDITH m.  ALICE WILLIAMS
– d. 
ALICE m.  THOMAS POWELL
– d. 
BENJAMIN
–ca. 
ANNE
–
PENRY ELIZA JOHN THOMAS

– b.  b.  b. 
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xiii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

STOCKER GENEALOGY
JOHN STOCKER
DUDDLESTONE m.  SUSANNAH MINVIELLE
b. 
SARAH m .  GEORGE REECE
JOHN m.  SARAH CLEMENT

– b. 
JANE m. GEORGE BROWN
JOHN
b.  d. 
unm.
ANTHONY m.  MARGARET PHILIPS

– –
(see Appendix C)
ANTHONY m. ANN CATHERINE m. ROBERT RUMSEY

d.  d. 
CATHERINE ROBERT
b.  d. 
(infancy)
SARAH m. MAURICE BATEMAN
MARY m.  HUGH PENRY

– –
JOSEPH m. MARY WARREN
d.  d. 
MARY PENRY
–
MARTHA m.  ADAM TUCK

– d. 
MARY GRACE
– –
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xiv 5/1/18 3:59 PM

editorial note
This volume includes all the surviving letters by Mary Penry that are known
to me, except eight business letters related to the single sisters’ textile indus-
try. Appendix D prints one of these letters and identifies the others’ loca-
tions. This volume does not print letters (in Penry’s hand) that she wrote for
others; it does not print the diary of the Lititz single sisters’ choir that Penry
kept from 1762 to 1804; and it does not print the financial accounts she pro-
duced each year.
All the texts printed in this volume, except Letters 9 and 10 and Penry’s
memoir (lebenslauf; see Appendix A), were written in English. These three
exceptions were written in German. Unlike most eighteenth-century Mora-
vians, however, Penry did not use German script (Kurrentschrift); she used
Latin script, as she did when she wrote in English. For these three German-
language texts, I have provided English translations and, immediately follow-
ing, transcriptions of the originals.
At the top of each letter, I identify the addressee, the letter’s date, and the
place it was written. Penry’s date and location, which she sometimes placed at
the letter’s top and sometimes at its bottom, I have placed at the top of the
letter flush with the right margin. I have placed Penry’s salutation flush with
the left margin and her signature flush with the right margin. I have placed
elements of her farewell flush with the right margin only when she has clearly
separated that element from the sentence of which it is part. An unnumbered
note at the bottom of each letter identifies the collection that contains the
letter and the form of the source text: ALS (autograph letter signed by
Penry), Copy (contemporary manuscript copy, with the copyist identified
when possible), Printed Copy (document transcribed from a printed source),
or Typed Copy (document transcribed from a typescript when the original
manuscript no longer exists). This note also reports on other marks on the
letter (e.g., the address, the endorsement) and any information about its
delivery.
Even the most conservative transcription, determined to be faithful to the
original manuscript, changes that manuscript by rendering it in print. I have
not reproduced Penry’s line breaks, and I have regularized the indentation of
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xv 5/1/18 3:59 PM

xvi editorial note
her paragraphs. Penry often did not use a period to end a sentence if that
sentence concluded at the end of a line; she often used an uppercase letter at
the start of a line even when a new sentence had not begun; and she often
omitted a period in the middle of a line, leaving variable-sized spaces where
one sentence ended and another began. It would be impossible to reproduce
such features without reproducing Penry’s line breaks, and there is no good
reason to attempt to do so. Therefore, I have added punctuation at the end of
sentences and removed the uppercase letters that appear at the start of a new
line. I have added such end punctuation sparingly to preserve Penry’s ten-
dency to string related sentences and phrases together with commas and her
fondness for punctuating with dashes (though I have regularized these as em
dashes).
Penry’s handwriting was clear throughout her life. Her words are rarely
difficult to decipher, except when the manuscript itself is damaged. There are
remarkably few cancelled words or interlinear insertions. I have preserved
Penry’s spelling except on very rare occasions, and in such cases I have placed
my emendations in brackets. I have marked the places where damage to the
text has left words impossible to recover with “[missing]” and, for those spots
where I could not make out a word, “[illegible].” When missing words, how-
ever, could be easily reconstructed, I have placed my reconstruction within
brackets. Where Penry underlined a word, I have substituted italics. I have
also expanded abbreviations and superscripts (e.g., “Br” becomes “Brother,”
“Philada” becomes “Philadelphia”).
Heavily edited excerpts of sixteen letters were published in the following
issues of The Moravian:
Volume 58: no. 43 (October 22, 1913): 687–88; no. 47 (November 19, 1913):
751; no. 49 (December 3, 1913): 773; no. 51 (December 17, 1913): 805.
Volume 59: no. 1 (January 7, 1914): 11; no. 3 (January 21, 1914): 43–45;
no. 5 (February 4, 1914): 75; no. 7 (February 18, 1914): 107; no. 9
(March 4, 1914): 139; no. 11 (March 18, 1914): 171–72; no. 13 (April 1,
1914): 203–4; no. 15 (April 15, 1914): 235–36; no. 17 (April 29, 1914):
267; no. 19 (May 13, 1914): 299; no. 23 (June 10, 1914): 363; no. 27
(July 8, 1914): 427–28; no. 31 (August 5, 1914): 491; no. 33 (August 19,
1914): 523; no. 37 (September 16, 1914): 587–88; no. 39 (September
30, 1914): 619–20; no. 41 (October 14, 1914): 651; no. 43 (October 28,
1914): 683.
Volume 60: no. 9 (March 3, 1915): 139–40; no. 13 (March 31, 1915): 203–4;
no. 15 (April 14, 1915): 235; no. 17 (April 28, 1915): 267.
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xvi 5/1/18 3:59 PM

editorial note xvii
Information in notes about individuals’ births, deaths, and marriages, and

about their movements within Moravian communities (or their departure
from Moravian communities altogether), derives from congregational dia-
ries, membership catalogs, and church registers, which are identified in the
bibliography.
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xvii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xviii 5/1/18 3:59 PM
abbreviations
ALS Autograph letter signed by Mary Penry

HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania
LCHS Lancaster County Historical Society
LOC Library of Congress
MAB Moravian Archives
MASP Moravian Archives, Southern Province
MP Mary Penry
NAK National Archives, Kew
NLW National Library of Wales
PCA Powys County Archives
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xix 5/1/18 3:59 PM

19140-Gordon_Letters.indd xx 5/1/18 3:59 PM
introduction
The letters of Mary Penry (1735–1804) offer a sustained glimpse into the
spiritual and social life of an ordinary eighteenth-century American woman
over a period of forty-five years. Mary Penry emigrated from Wales with her
widowed mother in 1744 and lived for a decade in cosmopolitan Philadelphia.
For the rest of her life, nearly fifty years, she lived in Bethlehem and Lititz,
small Moravian communities in Pennsylvania, as a single woman or, in
Moravian terminology, a “single sister.” Few eighteenth-century American
women produced such a prodigious amount of first-person writing as did
Penry, and little survives of what they produced. Penry appears as a minor
character in two famous diaries: both Elizabeth Drinker, whose diary of
staccato entries extends from 1758 to 1807, and Hannah Callender Sansom,
whose diary records a trip to Bethlehem in 1761, were Penry’s schoolmates,
and both describe their visits with her. In her own letters, of course, Penry
speaks in her own voice. Hers is a not an early American voice we have heard
before: deeply devout and garrulous, always, but also witty, plaintive, worldly-
wise, curious, heartbroken, joyous, prophetic, bold, irreverent.
Penry may have been an “ordinary” woman, but she is unusual in an impor-
tant way for historians of early America: she writes, self-consciously, as a single
woman at a time when singleness was rare. A recent study of revolutionary
1. Fewer than two dozen book-length volumes of first-person writing—letters, diaries, or jour-
nals—by eighteenth-century American women have appeared in print in the last century. In addi-
tion to collections that excerpt women’s writing—such as Evans, Weathering the Storm; and
Skidmore, Strength in Weakness—see Greene, Journal (1923); Hulton, Letters of a Loyalist Lady
(1927); Cowles, Diaries (1931); Shippen, Journal Book (1935); Knight, Journal of Madam Knight (1938);
Morris, Her Journal (1949); Pinckney, Letterbook (1972); Cooper, Diary (1981); Burr, Journal (1984);
Wister, Journal and Occasional Writings (1987); Drinker, Diary (1991); Murray, From Gloucester to
Philadelphia in 1790 (1998), Letters I Left Behind (2005), and Letters of Loss and Love (2009); Sansom,
Diary (2010); Heaton, World of Hannah Heaton (2003); Franks, Letters (2004); Clark, Voices from an
Early American Convent (2009); Warren, Selected Letters (2009); Adams, Letters (2016); and Osborne,
Collected Writings (2017).
19140-Gordon_Letters.indd 1 5/1/18 3:59 PM

2 the letters of mary penry
America tells the story of four women—the Philadelphian Deborah Reed

Franklin, the Mohawk Margaret Brant, the Virginian Elizabeth Dutoy
Porter, and her enslaved African Peg—to “represent the major varieties of
women’s experience” in eighteenth-century America. Rural, urban, white,
black, native, wealthy, impoverished: these women are various indeed. But all
were married. Penry’s letters, by contrast, offer the perspective of a woman
who chose to remain single. “I desire to spend and be spent,” she wrote, “in
the Service of the Virgin Choir” (Letter 64). This choice to remain single was
made possible by the Moravian communities in which Penry lived. In both
Bethlehem and Lititz, single women lived together in great stone buildings,
which Moravians called “choir” houses. In these choir houses, which still
stand, Moravian single sisters lived, worked, and worshipped alongside one
another. They also laughed, played music, gossiped, and mourned their dead.
These Moravian communities offered Penry not only the rare opportunity to
remain single but also to have a career that fulfilled her, as she worked at
varied occupations, including bookkeeper and translator, that supported her
and her community.
The early American culture that surrounded these Moravian communi-
ties pressured young women to marry to survive. This pressure was not
equally intense everywhere in early America. Unmarried women, as Karin
Wulf has shown, could find economic opportunities in urban environments.
Some religious groups that emphasized the spiritual equality of men and
women, including Pennsylvania’s Quakers, encouraged women of means to
imagine fulfilling lives independent of marriage. In general, however, early
Americans tended to conflate “woman” with “wife,” which ensured women’s
subordination and dependence. Unmarried women, as Wulf summarizes,
“defied the presumption of masculine authority over women” on which
Anglo-American society was organized. They remain invisible, too, in most
recent scholarship: “virtually every woman in 17th and 18th century America,”
one recent textbook asserts, “eventually married.” Few systematic studies
reveal what percentage of women in early America actually remained single.
In New England, where “religious and behavioral norms were supposed to be
inculcated voluntarily within the family,” singleness was very rare. A study of
late seventeenth-century Hingham, Massachusetts, found that only 3.4 per-
cent of women did not marry. One study of Quakers near Philadelphia
between 1681 and 1735 found that 14 percent of women never married; another
2. Gundersen, To Be Useful, 15.

3. Wulf, Not All Wives, 1–6. See also Chambers-Schiller, Liberty.
4. Kamensky, Colonial Mosaic, 58.
5. Seeman, “Better to Marry Than to Burn,” 398, 403.

introduction 3
study of two New Jersey Quaker meetings before 1786 found that about 10
percent of women had not married by the age of fifty. The rate of Quaker
women who had not married by age fifty rose later in the eighteenth century
to 23.5 percent, which roughly matches the rate of women among the Phila-
delphia gentry who had not married by fifty (17.6 percent before 1775, 23.2
percent from 1775 to 1800). But historians emphasize that these rates of sin-
gleness are unusually high, enabled by extraordinary economic circumstances
or religious beliefs. Among the general population, the rate of singleness was
much lower.
Cohorts of Moravian women tell a very different story and reveal the rare
opportunity that these settlements offered to single women. Visitors to
Bethlehem between 1754 and 1773, for instance, would have found that about
54 percent of the community’s women were single, having never married (an
additional 6 to 9 percent were widows). Some of these women, of course,
would marry. But the number of those who, like Penry, chose to remain single
throughout their life was high. In 1758, for instance, Penry lived with ninety-
three others in Bethlehem’s single sisters’ house. Over half of these women
(60 percent) were born in America. Most of the rest had emigrated from
Germany, but some women had been born in Norway, France, England, and
Wales. Among the group were three Native Americans (a Wampanoag, a
Delaware, and a Mohican), an African American (born in Trenton), and an
African (born in Guinea). It was a remarkably diverse group of women. An
astonishing 42 percent of these women remained single sisters for their entire
life. Half of these women lived into their sixties and many into their seventies
and eighties, and so most spent more than four decades as single sisters in a
Moravian choir house.
Anna Nitschmann (1715–1760) established the first house for single women
in 1730 at Herrnhut, a small village on the estate of Count Nicholas Ludwig
von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), about sixty miles from today’s Dresden. In 1727
Zinzendorf collaborated with a group of religious refugees, to whom he had
given sanctuary, to renew or reinvent a pre-Lutheran Protestant church
called the Ancient Brethren. For more than thirty years Zinzendorf led an
evangelical movement that spread Moravian piety throughout the Atlantic.
6. Klepp, “Fragmented Knowledge,” 231–33; Wells, “Quaker Marriage Patterns,” 426–28. See
also Wulf, Not All Wives, 13.
7. Smaby, Transformation, 54–56; Wulf, Not All Wives, 76. Gundersen conflates women who
were unmarried at a given time with those who remained single throughout their life. See To Be
Useful, 54.
8. Four left the Moravian church entirely, while the rest married within the church. The statistics
in this paragraph analyze a November 1758 single sisters’ membership catalog. See Catalogs of the
Single Sisters and Girls in Bethlehem, 1754–60, BethSS 26, MAB.

Moravians assured listeners that anybody would find salvation who accepted
the simple truth that only Christ’s sacrifice enabled unworthy human beings
to find the grace to do good, and Moravian hymns and sermons centered
devotion on Christ’s bloody wounds as the source of such grace. Individuals
were encouraged to cultivate a personal relationship with their Savior. Their
piety and simplicity, approximating the practice of the early apostles,
attracted followers from every rank of society, including the evangelists
George Whitefield and Charles and John Wesley. Zinzendorf expanded the
Pietist tendency to encourage worship in small bands by organizing his
movement into “choirs,” which were groups of people of the same gender at a
similar stage of life: single men worshiped with other single men, single
women with single women, married couples with married couples, widows
with widows. This arrangement offered an extraordinary amount of author-
ity to women, who, as a group of single sisters remarked, were “led and guided
by people like themselves, which . . . elsewhere in the whole world is not
usual.” Herrnhut’s single men and single women began to live together in
separate residences. This model was reproduced in Moravian settlements
around the globe in which the church owned all property, permitted only
Moravians to establish residences, and closely controlled the economic and
social activities of these residents.
Most recent scholarship on eighteenth-century Moravians in America has
focused on these settlement communities, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and
Salem (later Winston-Salem) in North Carolina. But such places were rare
in the Moravian Atlantic in the decades after the church’s renewal. More
common were the mission stations that Moravians established in the Carib-
bean islands, Africa, Greenland, and throughout colonial America from
Georgia to New York. In missions, a Moravian couple (or two) would minister
to a congregation of enslaved men and women in the West Indies or to a com-
munity of Native Americans who had converted to Christianity. In addition
to numerous missions, Moravians also established churches in urban centers,
including New York City, Philadelphia, Lancaster, and York. In these urban
areas, a pastor held services, sometimes in German and in English, and often
supervised a school for boys and girls. Church members lived dispersed in
family homes, and church authorities did not monitor or control their eco-
nomic lives. Many non-Moravians attended services, even though they had
9. For the early Moravian church and its evangelical efforts, see Atwood, Community of the Cross,
21–40; Engel, Religion and Profit, 13–38; and Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival.
10. Smaby, “Only Brothers,” 158, and “Gender Prescriptions.”
11. See Ritter, Moravian Church in Philadelphia; Stocker, History of the Moravian Church;
Albright, Moravian Congregation at York; and Gordon, “Entangled by the World.”

introduction 5
not been admitted either as provisional members or as full members who

participated in Holy Communion.
None of these Moravian communities relegated single women to the
“usual despised State of Old Maids” (Letter 52). Only “in the world outside”
of Moravian communities, Zinzendorf affirmed, was “an old maid . . . mocked
and scorned.” Zinzendorf did not, however, always speak of the single life
and married life equally. He often depicted marriage as the proper trajectory
for all single women: “The actual profession of a Single Sister when she is in
the Congregation,” he stated in an address to the single sisters in 1747, “is to
enter into marriage.” When Jean-François Reynier joined the Moravians at
Marienborn in late 1739, he was told that single people were only “half
people.” The choir system established in Moravian communities in the
1730s and the practices and piety in those houses, however, provided a power-
ful counterweight to such statements. The choir system was, as Craig Atwood
writes, a “practical expression of Zinzendorf ’s theory that the earthly exis-
tence of the Son of God has sanctified all aspects of human life”—including
singleness. A “Choir-Ode” for the single sisters in the 1759 Litany-Book, for
instance, reminded single sisters that:
In old Times was Virginity

Preserved but indiff ’rently;
For one did scarce a Virgin see,
But she was a Bride immediately.
The first Change happen’d in this Plan,

When the Creator was made Man;
And from that awful Hour we date
The Honour of the Virgin-State.
Regular ceremonies and festivals (e.g., May 4 was the single sisters’ festival),
hymns, and litanies particular to these choir houses valorized the state of single-
ness. These daily routines and this organized piety sustained Penry’s faith.
The popularity of the single sisters’ choir took Bethlehem’s founders by
surprise. Initially there were few single sisters in Bethlehem, and church
authorities did not expect the number to grow: most single sisters, they
thought, would quickly marry. But by 1746 the numbers of single women
12. Zinzendorf sermon in Smaby, “Gender Prescriptions,” 86; Zinzendorf address to the single
sisters in Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, 139n2. See also Fogleman, Two Troubled Souls, 81.
13. Atwood, Community of the Cross, 176.
14. Litany-Book, 280.

outgrew the space allotted to them. Authorities moved them to Nazareth, a

Moravian community a few miles north, but the choir’s continued growth
convinced authorities to find a place for it back in Bethlehem. The commu-
nity built a new house for its single brothers and, when the brothers vacated
their building, twenty-one single sisters (and twenty-eight older girls) returned
to Bethlehem in November 1748 to occupy it. When Mary Penry arrived in
Bethlehem in 1756, about seventy-five single sisters lived in the house, which
had been enlarged by an extension to the north in 1752 and would be further
enlarged in 1773 by an extension to the east. By 1760, over one hundred single
sisters (and many older girls) lived in the house, a number that would remain
stable for the next forty years.
Penry’s early experience did not promise a life in a Moravian choir house.
Born in 1735 in Abergavenny, Wales, Penry moved after the death of her
father, Hugh Penry (1705–1740), to Bristol with her mother, Mary Stocker
Penry (1715–1760). Moravian evangelists had worked in Bristol and in Wales
in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Their message of simple piety, based in the
celebration of Christ’s sacrifice, together with universal access to salvation
found a receptive audience. But Penry’s family, attached to the Anglican
church, had no contact with this movement. In 1744 mother and daughter
immigrated to America, invited to Philadelphia by a cousin who was married
to a rich Quaker merchant, William Attwood. The Penrys arrived on Sep-
tember 16 and moved into the Attwoods’ home. A powerful man, Attwood
served on Philadelphia’s city council and was elected mayor during these
years (1747–1748). He was involved in the transatlantic trade and had a diverse
set of financial interests. In the 1720s he was vending “Sundrey Sorts of Euro-
pean Goods,” including raisins, garlic, hats, and nails; he invested in the
Colebrookdale Iron Furnace in the 1730s; and in the 1740s he had his own
ship and wharf, where in 1748 the volunteer militia, formed to defend Phila-
delphia and the Delaware River during King George’s War, erected a ten-
foot-thick breastwork and a battery of thirteen guns. Attwood also sold
slaves. Only a few men—among them William Allen, Israel Pemberton,
Isaac Norris, and Anthony Morris—contributed more than the fifty pounds
15. Smaby, “Forming the Single Sisters’ Choir.” Moravian children were raised in a community
nursery, after which boys and girls were separated. Girls entered the little girls’ choir at the age of four
and the older (or great) girls’ choir at twelve or so. In their late teens, girls were eligible to join the
single sisters’ choir. See Smaby, Transformation, 10.
16. Catalogs of the Single Sisters and Girls in Bethlehem, MAB.
17. Jenkins, Moravian Brethren in North Wales; Dresser, “Moravians in Bristol”; Podmore, Mora-
vian Church in England, 88–96.

introduction 7
that Attwood gave to the Philadelphia Hospital for the Relief of the Poor.
The Penrys’ relative, Ann Attwood, died in 1747 of yellow fever, and subse-
quent events, as Penry tells them, resemble an eighteenth-century novel.
This wealthy Quaker seems to have forced Penry’s mother, who was living
in (and perhaps confined to) his home, to marry him. “Attwood was a terrible
person . . . who had little concern for either God or his fellow man,” Penry
wrote. But he “cajoled my mother so much, she did in fact marry him, albeit
of necessity” (Appendix A). What she meant by “of necessity” is unclear—
perhaps financial exigency, perhaps something darker. Mary Stocker Penry
gave birth to Attwood’s child, a daughter Elisabeth, on January 20, 1751; two
months later she married him. The Philadelphia Quaker Monthly Meeting
immediately began a process to disown Attwood, citing his “irregular &
Scandalous conduct in diverse respects.” Penry called her time in this
household an “Egyptian Bondage” (Letter 30). Attwood died on June 25,
1754. His will left 1,000 to his male cousins but only twenty shillings to
Mary Stocker Penry (later Attwood) and the same amount to “Mary Penry
junior.” The widow probably claimed her dower right, which in Pennsylva-
nia entitled her to a third of Attwood’s real property (his home, with rights
to use the yard for any chickens she had) but no part of his personal property.
“The law’s emphasis on real property, appropriate for an agricultural com-
munity,” Lisa Wilson notes, “failed to take into account the increasing
importance of personal wealth.” Mary Attwood, however, seems to have lived
comfortably after her second husband’s death.
Penry’s life in Philadelphia in her stepfather’s house mixed suffering with
opportunity. Penry learned to keep accounts, since the merchant Attwood
required her to write “day and Night when ever Bus’ness required” (Letter
30). She would use these skills for the rest of her life. She gained a very differ-
ent sort of education from the Quaker Anthony Benezet. The great aboli-
tionist began teaching at the Friends School in 1743 and began a girls’ school
18. American Weekly Mercury, October 10, 1723; Pennsylvania Gazette, July 19, 1744, April 28,
1748, May 29, 1755; Withington, “Pennsylvania Gleanings,” 469; Roth, Mayors of Philadelphia, 1:44–
51. Only eight of 360 men contributed more than Attwood did.
19. Ann Attwood died on August 26, 1747. See Births and Burials, 1686–1807, Philadelphia
Monthly Meeting, Quaker Meeting Records; and Balch, Letters and Papers, 9–10.
20. Attwood married the widowed Mary Penry on March 16, 1751 (Jordan, “Pennsylvania Mar-
riage Licenses,” 72), not 1747 as MP states (Appendix A); for Attwood’s disownment, see March 29,
April 26, May 31, 1751, Minutes, 1740–55, Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, Quaker Meeting Records.
21. William Attwood, Last Will and Testament, February 5, 1750, Will Book K-185, Register of
Wills Office. William Attwood composed this will as a widower.
22. Wilson, Life After Death, 30 (see also Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early
America, 141–84). See below for Mary Attwood’s financial circumstances upon her death.

there in summer 1754. In the mid-1740s, however, he taught Penry alongside

Elizabeth Sandwith (later Drinker), Hannah Callender (later Sansom), and
Timothy Matlack (later a leading Pennsylvania revolutionary)—all of whom
Penry referred to as school chums at “good Master Benezets school” (Letter
60). Benezet likely taught these children in a private setting, perhaps in the
home of one of the girls. Penry learned French, maybe from Maria Jeanne
Reynier, a friend of Benezet who taught the young Callender; Rebecca
Birchall, who taught Drinker, may have taught Penry as well. The most
important development in these years, however, was that Penry and her
mother began to frequent the Moravian church in Philadelphia after her
stepfather died.
In June 1755 Thomas Yarrell, the Moravian pastor in Philadelphia,
described some new attendees. Mary Attwood is “much Affected with our
preaching and loves us much,” he remarked, adding that although “in past
times [she] was not used to go out of her house any where”—William
Attwood seems to have confined his wife to their home—she “now comes
constantly to church.” Of Mary Penry, Yarrell noted simply, “Our saviour
works in her heart.” Penry visited the settlement town of Bethlehem, some
sixty miles north of Philadelphia, in early December 1755 and asked permis-
sion to remain. “Mary Penry, a Single woman from Philadelphia, was spoke
with,” authorities recorded. “The usual Questions being put to her, & the
dangerous Situation of the Times with Regard to the Indians being laid
before her, she declared that if she might be permitted to stay, she had much
rather undergo any Hardships with the Sisters than go to Philadelphia
again.” Some of the twenty-four “usual Questions” inquired into Penry’s
ties to the world (“Have you promised your self in Marriage to any Person?”
“Are you embroiled in Suits of Law with any one by Means whereof you may
be hereafter molested?”) and probed her spiritual circumstances (“Is the
Salvation of your Soul your Chief Concern?”). For reasons left unrecorded,
Penry’s request to move to Bethlehem was rejected.
23. Before 1754, girls appear in Friends School records only as sisters of male students. See
Anthony Benezet Papers, Box 14, and Teachers’ Accounts, Box 7, both in MC 1115, William Penn
Charter School Archives. For Benezet, see Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 20–24. For Quaker
education, see Rosenberg, “World Within”; and Fatherly, Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies, 69.
24. Sansom, Diary, 12, 330; Drinker, Diary, 1:99.
25. Thomas Yarrell to Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg, June 18, 1755, PhB II (Letters from
Philadelphia up to 1760), MAB.
26. December 5, 1755, Journal of the Commission of the Brethren, 1752–60, BethCong 239,
MAB. For Bethlehem during the French and Indian War, see Levering, History, 297–343.
27. Questions to Be Asked Discretionally by the Committee for the Regulation of Temporal
Affairs in the Church or Congregation of the United Brethren at Bethlehem Previous to the Admis-
sion of Persons Permitted to Reside Amongst Them, Box: Economy Papers, 1742–61, MAB.

introduction 9
Figure 1 Nicholas Garrison, “A View of Bethlehem, one of the Brethren’s Principal

Settlements, in Pennsylvania,” 1757. Mary Penry lived from 1756 to 1762 in the single
sister’s house, the last building (on the right) in the line of structures that face the Lehigh
River. Reproduced by permission of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Penry returned to Philadelphia. Mary Attwood, who did not want to

separate from her daughter, thought about moving with both daughters to
Bethlehem or to Lancaster or York. Yarrell thought that “Philadelphia for
the present is the best place for both Mother and Daughter.” In January 1756,
both mother and daughter were formally admitted to Philadelphia’s Mora-
vian congregation: Christian Seidel, present at the service, noted the “tears of
love and joy” that they shed. Elisabeth Attwood, the young daughter of Mary
and William Attwood, participated in the life of the congregation and
pleased everybody in March by singing a Moravian hymn in German. (The
girl died on September 26, 1758, and was buried in the Moravian graveyard
in Philadelphia.) Penry, however, continued to beg for permission to move
to Bethlehem. In May 1756, Mary Attwood asked Yarrell “how it will be
determined about her daughter Molly if she comes to Bethlehem or not.”
28. Thomas Yarrell to Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg, December 16, 1755, PhB II (Letters from
Philadelphia up to 1760); January 25, 1756, [Christian Seidel], Journal from His Visit to Philadelphia
and Jersey, TravJournals 146; Catalog of Moravians, Friends, and Children Deceased in Philadelphia,
1744–68, MC Phila I.514; May 5, 1756, Diary of the Philadelphia Congregation, MC Phila I.7–8, 192,
all in MAB.

Permission soon came. On June 16, 1756, Mary Penry left Philadelphia to join
the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem.
The Philadelphia she left had about seventeen thousand inhabitants. It
had recently become the largest city in colonial America, surging ahead of
Boston but not yet overtaken by New York. Bethlehem in 1756 comprised
about eight hundred men, women, and children. The frontier town had
recently fortified itself in anticipation of an Indian attack. Religious, social,
and economic life was organized by choirs; the community raised small chil-
dren in a nursery, a practice that freed adults to undertake the missionary
work that was the settlement’s primary goal. In these years (1741–62), Bethle-
hem featured an extraordinary social arrangement usually referred to as the
General Economy or “communal housekeeping.” One of the questions asked
of those who wished to move to Bethlehem described this Economy: “Do you
know that we here live together in Common, and that no One receives any
Wages for his Work, but are like Children in one House, contented with
necessary Food and Rayment?” Everyone in Bethlehem contributed his or
her labor and, in exchange, received housing, food, clothing, medical care,
and educational opportunities. A 1752 list identifies thirty-six different trades
in which Bethlehem’s men and women worked. Whites, blacks, and Native
Americans lived together, worked together, worshiped together, and were
buried together in what was perhaps the most egalitarian community of its
time.
Penry felt that by moving to a Moravian settlement community she had
left “the World.” “It pleased our dear Saviour in my 19th year,” she wrote to
her Welsh relatives, “to give me a gracious call in my heart to bring me off
from the World and the things of it, to fix me on him” (Letter 3). The sense of
detaching oneself from the world was central to the experience of joining a
settlement community, and memoirs often depict family and friends as
impediments to one’s effort to orient oneself away from the “world.” Indeed,
writers frequently mistook Moravian single sisters for nuns, confined to mas-
sive stone houses and isolated from the world. A 1773 visitor to Bethlehem,
who thought Moravians “resembl[ed] the Roman Catholicks,” regretted that
single women were “Cloistered up.” In 1784 Ezra Stiles called the single sisters’
29. Smith, “Death and Life,” 865; Memorabilia, 1756, Diary of the Congregation at Bethlehem,
BethCong 15, MAB.
30. Questions to Be Asked Discretionally, MAB. On January 25, 1757, Penry promised to abide
by the congregation’s rules and regulations. See Declarations at the Reception, 1757, Box: Economy
Papers, MAB.
31. For early Bethlehem, see Levering, History; Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds; Smaby, Trans-
formation; Moglen, “Excess and Utopia.”
32. Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs, 42, 88.

introduction 11
house a “Nunnery,” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hymn of the

Moravian Nuns of Bethlehem” (1825) drew on this impression. Some schol-
ars, surprisingly, continue to describe single sisters as “cloister[ed]” or as
“sequestered under the strictest rule from the world . . . like novices, protected
behind the garden walls of a village monastery.”
The lines that separated Moravian communities from the communities
around them were not walls: they were boundaries, clearly drawn but capable
of being crossed, even by single women. We learn from Penry’s letters that
the worldview of a Pietist woman was not as limited or as insular as we may
expect. Katherine Carté Engel has documented the extensive commercial
activities that connected Bethlehem’s choir houses to the surrounding com-
munities. Many Moravians, including single sisters such as Penry, also
preserved persistent and deeply felt social ties with the world beyond Mora-
vian settlements. Penry’s experience reveals the many and varied affiliations
that tethered her to the world. Every week Penry wrote to her mother, who
covered her daughter’s purchases from the community store. Indeed, Mary
Attwood visited Bethlehem each year until her death in May 1760. Penry
traveled frequently to visit friends in Lancaster, Philadelphia, Harrisburg,
and Baltimore. She kept informed about politics from newspapers and from
her correspondents, and she sent information to her friends, hoping that they
would respond in kind. “I am a great Politician,” she confided to a friend, “but
am very careful of speaking my Sentiments” (Letter 37). Penry’s letters were
both how she kept connected to the world and the surviving traces of these
many affiliations. These social ties, which Penry’s letters document exten-
sively, supplemented the relationships that became central for individuals
who joined a settlement community: the individuals’ relationship with their
Savior and with the new family of choir members with whom they lived and
worked.
The Moravian single sisters became Penry’s family, but Penry never shed
her pre-Moravian identity or ties. Indeed, she struggled to reconnect where
33. Hills, “Summer Jaunt,” 209; Ezra Stiles, “Itineraries,” 3:659, Ezra Stiles Papers, 1727–95,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Ferguson, God’s Fields, 273; Southern,
“Strangers Below,” 87. For efforts to distinguish single sisters’ houses from convents, see the London
Chronicle, June 29, 1780, 1; Judith Sargent Murray to Dorcas Babson Sargent, June 22, 1790, in From
Gloucester to Philadelphia, 139.
34. Engel, Religion and Profit.
35. The three pounds that MP spent in 1759 was “paid by her Mother.” See Ledger of the Store at
Bethlehem, 1768–75 (Ledger C), BethStore 102, MAB. Mary Attwood left her estate to her daughter.
In May 1763, after sending MP 147 of “Goods & Effects” and clearing substantial debts, the executor
still had 308.6.1 in hand. These funds may have been transferred to MP in Lititz. See Mary Attwood,
Last Will and Testament, November 12, 1758, Will Book L-538, Estate Inventory, October 20, 1760,
Administrative Account, May 25, 1763, Register of Wills Office.

Figure 2 Abersenny, in Defynnog, Wales, where Mary Penry’s grandfather lived.

Author’s photo.
connections had been severed. She tried to contact her Welsh relatives when
she was in her twenties but did not hear back from them for over thirty years;
as a result, she felt abandoned for most of her life. Her longing for this con-
nection solidified a Welsh identity that otherwise might have never taken
hold in this woman who barely remembered a Wales she left as a young child.
Family always reminded Penry of what she had lost—not just lost fellowship
but also a loss of status and wealth, which her parents’ families had possessed
generations earlier. She heard from her mother of the great Welsh estates
that the Penry family built: Hugh Penry, vicar of Llywel and Devynock,
erected the mansion Llwyncyntefin in 1634; his grandson built Penpont; and
Mary Penry’s grandfather had lived in a house called Abersenny (Letter 47).
But times had changed. “It has pleased the Lord to humble our Family,”
Penry admitted. Theophilus Jones’s 1809 History of the County of Brecknock
referred to the few living Penrys as “very poor,” and Penry herself joked that
if one were to “place an u between the n and r” in her name, it is “what we are
brought to” (Letters 36 and 37). When Mary Stocker (Penry’s mother) mar-
ried the impoverished Hugh Penry, her family, which slave labor on Barbados
36. Jones, History of the County of Brecknock, 2:678.

introduction 13
sugar plantations had made wealthy, disinherited her. In the 1760s Mary
Penry would reconcile with her mother’s family. Her cousin, Anthony
Stocker, had immigrated to Philadelphia and prospered as a merchant, and
during the 1790s whenever she traveled to Philadelphia she lodged with his
widow. Indeed, Margaret Phillips Stocker became her closest friend. But this
intimate contact with the Stockers, living “in the greatest affluence,” only
emphasized her own “Constrained Circumstances” (Letter 31) and reminded
her of what she and her mother had been denied.
During the 1760s Penry even tried to recover a substantial inheritance
out of which, she believed, her mother had been cheated. Mary Stocker’s
marriage to Hugh Penry led her father’s family—the Stockers—to disin-
herit her. A larger inheritance was due from her maternal grandfather,
Commodore Thomas Warren. Warren’s two daughters each had a daughter:
when one granddaughter (“Miss Day”) died unmarried and without chil-
dren, an estate of 300 a year should have passed to the other, Mary Penry’s
mother (Letter 9). Penry recruited the help of Moravian authorities to
recover these funds. She found that, without skill at negotiating the British
legal system and funds to enable a lawsuit, a right was difficult to assert. Her
efforts were unsuccessful. She indulged a tendency, which she understood
was a “weakness,” to “lament at the loss of Fortune” throughout her life
(Letter 54). At other times, however, she considered these deprivations as
blessings: “it matters little wether we have earthly treasure or not,” she
wrote. “I believe most certainly that it was good for me that I have been
afflicted—It has weand my heart from this world and its vanities” (Letter
31). Penry’s sense of having been deprived of things rightfully hers—family
as well as fortune—never left her.
One of Penry’s first challenges when she moved to Bethlehem was to learn
German, the primary language of most residents and the language in which
religious services were held and records were kept. Penry was a quick study.
When in 1762 she moved to Lititz, a small community about eight miles
north of Lancaster, authorities assigned her responsibility for the daily diary
of the single sisters’ choir. She wrote this diary for more than forty years, in
German, and regularly produced membership catalogs and financial records
for the single sisters’ choir, also in German. Penry thought that “the Constant
use of the German Tongue, all our Meetings being in that Language and near
40 Years constant dwelling with Germans,” caused “a Material Injury” to her
“English tongue.” She asked her cousins to pardon her “Germanisms. . . . The
37. See Appendix B. A legacy due to MP’s mother from her stepmother was also denied (Letter 6).

Figure 3 Detail of Samuel Reincke, “View of Lititz,” 1809. The parsonage and church
stand between the single sisters’ house in which Mary Penry lived from 1762 to 1804
(on the left) and the single brothers’ house (on the right). Reproduced by permission of
the Moravian Church Museum and Archives, Lititz, Pennsylvania.
Monosylables in particular . . . are either too frequent, or wrong placed” (Let-

ters 37 and 48). But her letters, most of which were written in English, indi-
cate that Penry moved easily between English and German.
The Moravian community at Lititz, to which Penry moved in 1762, was
even smaller than was Bethlehem. The settlement at Lititz had been estab-
lished only in 1756, developing from the nearby town and country congrega-
tion of Warwick, where church members lived on scattered family farms. In
1761, only 257 individuals (ninety-seven of whom were children) lived at Lititz
and Warwick. Lititz consisted of a school, a large mill, a church and parson-
age, several private dwellings, a store, and a brothers’ house and sisters’ house.
(Philadelphia’s Moravian congregation had raised more than fifty pounds,
including ten shillings from Mary Attwood, toward the construction of this
38. For work on translation and bilingualism in the eighteenth century, see Erben, Harmony of
the Spirits; Weber, “Translation as a Prism”; McMurran, Spread of Novels, 1–26, and “Crèvecoeur’s
Transatlantic Bilingualism”; and von Morzé, “Cultural Transfer in the German Atlantic.”

introduction 15
sisters’ house in Lititz.) The single brothers had occupied their house in
October 1758, but no women yet resided in the single sisters’ house. The
bishop Matthias Hehl (1705–1787) and his wife lived there, and the congrega-
tion met for services in its first-floor meeting hall (saal)—that is, until the
first group of single women, including Penry, arrived in May and June 1762.
By the end of 1764, thirty-one women lived in this single sisters’ house. Thirty
years later, Penry reported that “we are 56 in Number of different ages, from
15 to Sixty” (Letter 41). At sixty, Penry was the oldest woman in the house.
Moravian authorities wished that their settlement places were insulated
from the storms of local and national politics, but political strife often visited
Lititz. In December 1763 several Paxton Boys, fresh from slaughtering four-
teen Conestoga Indians at the Lancaster workhouse, threatened Lititz,
shooting off their guns and shouting “God damn you, Moravians.” During
the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army established a hospital in the
Lititz brothers’ house. At one point, six armed soldiers entered Penry’s sis-
ters’ house, apparently in search of blankets. The Revolution also inter-
rupted transatlantic communication, severing permanently Penry’s ties to
several friends in Great Britain. (Few letters from this period survive.) The
early republic’s partisan strife also reached small villages such as Lititz. Pen-
ry’s letters trace her responses to the major political events of late eighteenth-
century America—the Jay Treaty, the XYZ Affair, French attacks on
American shipping, the end of Washington’s presidency, the beginning of
Adams’s, the rise of Jefferson—that intensified the partisan divisions between
the emergent Republican Party, aligned with revolutionary France, and the
Federalist Party of Washington and Adams. Penry’s friends knew her politi-
cal preferences: “I read no Demo’s paper,” she reminded her friend Elizabeth
Drinker (Letter 63), and her disgust for figures such as Thomas Paine and for
the “Pernicious Doctrine” advanced by the French Revolution once got her in
trouble with the Speaker of Pennsylvania’s Assembly.
Penry described the single sisters’ house in which she lived as an “Azylum.”
She meant primarily that the choir house was a religious refuge that protected
her from the spiritual dangers of the wider world. But Moravian choir houses
also served Penry and others as an economic refuge. They offered a place of
security from an early American social and economic world that posed par-
ticular dangers to single women for whom the promise of America had
turned out to be an illusion. Many single women and their families were
39. For early Lititz, see Brickenstein, “Sketch of the Early History of Lititz.”
40. Gordon, “Paxton Boys and the Moravians”; Jordan, “Military Hospitals”; Beck, “Military
Hospital.”

casualties of the Atlantic system, swept to America by the promise of a better

life and better opportunities only to discover, once here, that their hard work
guaranteed them nothing. Following our urge to tell stories of immigrant
success, we often overlook these people. Moravian single sisters’ houses
embraced women whose circumstances had left them little hope. “These
Houses,” Penry boasted, “have prov’d an Azylum for Numbers, who had
they been left to seek their Bread in the midst of a deluding World, might
have been led astray into the Paths of Vice, which has been the Misfortune of
but too many Young Persons of our Sex” (Letter 18). Young women were not
invited to join Moravian communities to save them from economic peril:
one’s worldly circumstances, unfortunate or privileged, did not earn one
admission to a choir house. No woman entered a Moravian community
unless church authorities trusted that she was awakened spiritually, and
authorities rejected many requests to join the community. But if women such
as Penry were not welcomed because they were in precarious domestic or
economic situations, they were welcomed from such circumstances. The strict
spiritual standard for admission to Moravian communities was not used to
exclude the most vulnerable individuals in early American society.
Penry’s experience enabled her to see the hard truths about immigrants’
lives, and she warned her Welsh cousins about stories of a better life in
America. The “first outbreak of America fever” in Wales began in 1791, with
Welsh immigration reaching its peak in 1794–97. This Welsh immigration
was part of a large wave of immigration from Great Britain in the 1790s. In
the summer of 1791 alone, between three and four thousand Irish arrived in
Philadelphia. Penry believed that most immigrants “with tears lament they
ever left their Country” and are “half distracted, at finding things so vastly
different from the discription given them” (Letter 42). Many immigrants
“expected riches and liberty,” a Scotsman in Baltimore wrote in 1803, “but
found nothing but a struggle to keep themselves alive.” The Moravian sis-
ters’ houses made room for poor immigrant women, giving some a chance at
a fulfilling life. Worried about her young Welsh cousin, Penry opined that “a
Single woman of her age seems somehow so unprotected in the midst of the
World! I never experienced this because in my twentieth year I came to live
among a House, full of Maidens, and have continued among them ever since”
(Letter 71). Penry thought about returning to Wales after her mother died.
But she would have returned penniless, and in such circumstances, she asked,
41. See Gordon, “Asylum.”

42. Williams, Search for Beulah Land, 30, 130; Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, 1–2, quotation at
178; Davies, “Very Different Springs,” 376.

introduction 17
“to whom should the helpless Maiden go?” (Letter 37). Penry’s life in America
constitutes an answer to that question. If she were lucky, the “helpless
Maiden” could “go” to a Moravian single sisters’ house, which offered eco-
nomic and social, as well as spiritual, asylum.
Penry’s letters reveal how the different spaces in the sisters’ house shaped
this diverse community that lived together within it. All the single sisters
gathered for worship services, for some meals, and to sleep; but for much of
the day they met in smaller groups of six to eight, organized according to the
forms of labor in which they were engaged. “Every appartment in which we
Sisters live together,” Penry wrote, “may be calld a little Family” (Letter 41).
Penry’s eight “Room Companions” spun cotton for their livelihood, but
Penry spent her days differently: she sat at “a Window fronting the Street” in
a “large Room,” “a round Table before me, behind me my Bureau with a
Closet on the Top, sometimes, indeed most frequent writing at my Desk”
(Letter 37). Late in life, Penry “removed into a little Room to myself ” in the
sisters’ house. This room, “exactly 10 Feet Square,” was a private workspace.
Penry continued to sleep “in the large Hall with the rest of the Family” and
spent evenings “sometimes in one room sometimes in another but never in
my Room unless I have something particular to do” (Letter 66). Penry was
given privacy only to do her work: she was not provided private space for
personal reasons, nor did she desire it.
Penry served as “Clerk” for the single sisters’ house in Lititz. “I keep the
Accounts of our House,” she wrote, “and write letters of Busness” (Letter 29).
She was responsible for recording and reporting to church authorities the
business activities of the single sisters’ choir, including their spinning indus-
tries and their girls’ school, and for corresponding with those outside Lititz
about these activities. Contacts from her years in Philadelphia, the Shippens
and the Franklins, purchased spun cotton from the single sisters in Lititz
during the 1770s. Penry also kept, as we have seen, the daily diary of her
choir, in which she described the comings and goings of the single sisters,
reported the arrival and departure of visitors, noted the choir’s religious ser-
vices and the spiritual milestones of its members, and remarked on events in
the larger world that affected the choir. Penry was also responsible for guid-
ing visitors around the community, and she was paid to translate documents.
She earned income, too, by embroidery and tambour (embroidery on a
frame), traveling to Lancaster to diversify her skills in April 1774. Other
43. See Appendix D. For MP’s invoices to the family of Elizabeth Henry, a student at the girls’
school, see Elizabeth Henry, Accounts, 1779–81, Box 10:14, Henry Family Papers, 1759–1909, Acces-
sion Number 1209, Hagley Museum and Library.
44. Brickenstein, “Sketch of the Early History of Lititz,” 371.

Figure 4 A page from the Lititz single sisters’ financial accounts from 1771. Mary Penry
produced such accounts each May. Reproduced by permission of the Moravian Archives,
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
single sisters in Lititz performed different tasks: they wove muslin, flax, and
wool; spun cotton; worked as mantua makers and seamstresses; labored
outdoors at gardening, hay making, and reaping; baked bread; and washed
and mended for the single men (Letter 41). In Bethlehem, single sisters
tended livestock, as Hannah Callender found when during her visit she was
awakened by “one Hundred Cows, a number of them with Bells, a venerable
goat and two she goats” driven into “town by two Sisters.” Other women in
Lititz’s single sisters’ house served as spiritual leaders and helped in other
ways to administer the large community of women.
45. Sansom, Diary, 154.

introduction 19
Figure 5 From the Lititz single sisters’ membership catalog, 1780. Mary Penry produced
these catalogs regularly. She probably drew the decorative rose on the left-hand page.
Reproduced by permission of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The single sisters at Lititz were paid for their labor (as they were at
Bethlehem after 1762, when its General Economy ended). The single sisters
still ate, worked, and slept alongside one another. But each woman paid for
items or services that under the General Economy she would have received
in exchange for her labor. Penry paid 0.2.6 each week for room and board,
which guaranteed her a “good plain Dinner, of Meat Broth,” seasonal veg-
etables, and tea for breakfast and in the afternoon. She contributed a bit
more for materials for a fire and for candles and to have her clothes washed
(Letter 41). The transition from communal housekeeping to wage labor
may have made some single sisters anxious about how they could earn
money to support these expenses. Bethlehem’s authorities orchestrated the
transition from the General Economy to ensure that each single sister would
be able to earn a living. A planning document reveals that authorities

expected several single sisters to become seamstresses, while others would

make linens, wash and mend clothes, work in the garden and kitchen, make
and bleach twine, and help with the harvest and with the animals. They
proposed that, if a resident of the single sisters’ house familiar with linen
weaving would start a weaving shop, the single sisters would be given part
of a field to sow flax or hemp, which later they could prepare and spin.
Even with a wage economy, these choir houses insulated single sisters from
the precariousness of the early American economy. Penry never worried
that she would become destitute. Her community would care for her even
if she could no longer contribute economically, as she wrote of a single sister
too sick to labor: “She will want for Nothing as long as she lives, and will be
attended with the very same care and tenderness as one in affluent Circum-
stances” (Letter 27). Penry prayed that she would never become a burden to
her community.
Penry spent her life writing. Some of this labor involved business corre-
spondence, as we have seen, and she wrote letters for those who did not speak
English well. In the 1760s and 1770s, Penry was paid to translate for the
church (Letter 70). To knit together the far-flung communities of the Mora-
vian diaspora, authorities established an ambitious system by which reports
from mission stations, settlement places, and urban churches were copied,
circulated transatlantically, and read aloud in each Moravian community.
Scribes in Bethlehem and at Nazareth Hall (an educational institution north
of Bethlehem), for instance, produced seven copies of the Bethlehem and
Nazareth diaries for Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Europe, the West
Indies, and varied mission stations; they copied other materials for the town
and country congregations; and for Jamaica and Bethabara, North Carolina,
they copied the vast and varied “congregation accounts” (Gemeinnachrichten),
which were letters and reports collected from around the Moravian diaspo-
ra. Copyists were not enough: German-language texts had to be translated
for English-speaking Moravian churches. In the 1760s, Penry herself was
responsible for translating the Gemeinnachrichten. She translated discourses
on watchwords, pastoral conferences, sermons by bishop August Gottlieb
Spangenberg, travel journals to Surinam, dozens of letters from Jamaica and
Barbados and from missionaries in Greenland, diaries from Russia and Ire-
46. Projects for the Intended Change of the Bethlehem Economy, re: Single Sisters, 1761, Box:
Transition Period 1761–72, MAB.
47. See Wessel, “Connecting Congregations”; Beachy, “Manuscript Missions”; Schutt, “Complex
Connections.”
48. A Description of Duties Assigned to Copyists in Bethlehem and Nazareth in the 1760s,
PHC 262, MAB.

introduction 21
Figure 6 The first page of a 1768 letter from Mary Penry to Joseph and Martha Powell
(Letter 14 in this volume). Reproduced by permission of the Moravian Archives,
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
land, reports from Lusatia and Copenhagen, memoirs of deceased members

from around the world, congregational diaries from a half dozen mission
stations in the West Indies, results of synods in America and in Europe, and
comprehensive histories of the annual work of the entire Moravian church
that were composed at Zeist, the Moravian center in the Netherlands. Her

work on these congregation accounts continued at least until 1774, when she
worked on extracts from congregational diaries from Russia and Labrador.
In addition to these duties, Penry spent substantial amounts of time writ-
ing to her friends and relatives. Penry’s letters (and correspondents) reveal
the complex sources of her sense of self: a Welsh nation she barely remem-
bered, a cosmopolitan Philadelphia in which she briefly lived in affluence, an
egalitarian Moravian spiritual community in which she spent her adult life.
These letters reveal the strands out of which Penry wove her identity. Even
more, they functioned to “maintain and extend . . . social networks” that
could be mobilized to her own or her friends’ social, spiritual, or economic
benefit. Penry used her letters to spark relationships between her varied
correspondents. She urged her unmarried Welsh cousin to write to the
Moravian single sisters at Haverfordwest, and she tried to connect her Lititz
friends to Elizabeth Drinker by asking the former to deliver letters to the
latter. Relying on friends to carry correspondence could serve this social
purpose: it also avoided the costs of using the postal system. The post imposed
a financial burden, usually on the friends who received her letters (since
recipients typically paid the cost of postage of letters circulated within the
United States) and sometimes on Penry herself (since by the 1790s she could
send letters “post paid” at offices in Lancaster or Philadelphia, and she paid
the cost of letters sent transatlantically) (Letters 33 and 66). Most of Penry’s
letters describe how they have been transmitted, express frustration at letters
that lay for long periods at merchants’ shops (Letters 49 and 52), or ask about
letters that may have been lost. The letters collected here hint at a much
larger body of work. While some letters miscarried, many others, success-
fully delivered, no longer survive. Extant letters mention regular correspon-
dence with Nancy Vaughn at Haverfordwest, with Molly Gwillim of
Abergavenny, with her cousin Jenny Brown in New Haven, and with the
minister Christoph Gottfried Peter in New York. Nearly a dozen letters to
Elizabeth Drinker are lost. Penry’s weekly correspondence with her mother
49. Congregation Accounts, Box: Old English Translations II (Gemein Nachrichten); Congre-
gation Accounts 1774, Items 39–40, Box: G.N. / Engl. 1750–89, New York Ser. I; February 1–May 31,
1768, Diary of the Friedenshütten Congregation, MissInd 131.5, all in MAB.
50. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives. For founding texts on epistolary writing and an overview of
the field, see Stanton, Female Autograph; Altman, Epistolarity; and Gaul and Harris, Letters and
Cultural Transformation, 1–12.
51. See O’Neill, Opened Letter, 1–46, quotation at 1. See also Dierks, In My Power.
52. For letters, now lost, that Drinker received, see August 16, December 28, 1797, January 18,
March 16, December 31, 1799, May 26, 1800, July 22, 1802, March 24, May 18, and November 16, 1803,
in Drinker, Diary, 2:953, 990, 1131, 1146, 1251, 1303, 1536, 1367, 3:1651, 1704.

introduction 23
between 1756 and 1760 is lost. The greatest loss in volume is likely Penry’s
correspondence with her cousin, Margaret Stocker, in Philadelphia.
Most of the vast materials that survive in Moravian archives were pro-
duced by the men who led the church, although writings by Moravian women
(e.g., spiritual memoirs, diaries of single sisters’ choirs, reports from mission
stations) survive as well. Much of this material, since it was read aloud in
congregation or choir meetings, constituted the daily diet of ordinary Mora-
vians. But little evidence survives to indicate how Moravians assimilated
these lessons that were addressed to them. Some such evidence is available
through congregational records, especially the minutes of overseers’ commit-
tees, which capture much about ordinary Moravians’ daily lives. But these
sources dwell disproportionately on the tensions that such committees were
established to manage. Even the memoirs (Lebensläufe) in which Moravian
men and women described their spiritual journey were composed to be read
in public, with an awareness of generic expectations, and so tend to offer an
idealized version of Moravian life. An extensive personal correspondence
such as Penry’s is extremely rare and offers an unusual opportunity to exam-
ine how an ordinary church member received, understood, and disseminated
the ideas and lessons she heard over the course of fifty years.
Moravians documented more of their lives than did most early Americans,
but even they, as Leland Ferguson has written, “did not write down most of
what they thought or did.” Penry recorded more than did most Moravians.
Most of her correspondents were not Moravians, and some were not Ameri-
cans, so she felt obliged to explain the young American republic and the
principles and practices of her church to those who knew nothing of them.
She composed a thousand-word history of the Moravian church, describing
the martyrdom of John Hus in 1415, the church’s efforts to preserve unbroken
apostolic succession, and its revival in the 1720s (Letter 41). In describing and
explaining daily life in a Moravian community to outsiders, Penry’s letters
contain information not typically found in Moravian records because these
take the everyday and the normal for granted. Her sharp eye and skillful pen
also recorded life beyond Moravian settlements: an ox roasted on the frozen
Delaware, air balloons that some had proposed for transatlantic travel, a visit
to Philadelphia’s “African church,” and the suppression of the Whiskey Rebel-
lion. She reports on economic matters from food prices to politicians’ salaries
to the fluctuating rent prices in Philadelphia and land prices in Pennsylvania’s
53. See Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs; Smaby, Transformation, 125–44.

54. See Peucker, “In the Blue Cabinet,” 7–8; Petterson and Faull, “Speaking About Marriage.”
55. Ferguson, God’s Fields, 34.

backcountry. International and national politics absorbed her. Church lead-

ers forbade members from taking sides in partisan disputes (“It is a Stated
Rule in our Congregations that none of their Members engage in Politics or
Parties” [Letter 37]), but Penry expressed her allegiances openly in her let-
ters. She mourned when her hero Washington “surrenderd” his office after
two terms, had hopes for John Adams, and despised Jefferson.
Penry’s Federalist, Anglophile political identity, which emerged from her
life in a conservative religious community (and as a British immigrant who
never fully embraced America), was fostered by the newspapers she read.
Jeffrey Pasley has shown that, in the absence of a consistent party system in
the early republic, newspapers were the “fabric that held the parties together
between elections and conventions, connected voters and activists to the
larger party, and linked the different political levels and geographic regions of
the country.” Partisan newspapers not only helped create the parties them-
selves but also created “a sense of membership, identity, and common cause
among political activists and voters.” Mary Penry’s eager consumption and
dissemination of political news makes it clear that even readers who were
neither activists nor voters—women, for instance—were similarly energized
by a newspaper’s “common rhetoric and common ideas” into committed
partisans. It is not surprising that Penry mentions William Cobbett so
often: his Porcupine’s Gazette taught her how to understand global events.
Penry, in turn, attempted to recruit her correspondents into seeing things
similarly.
Penry’s enjoyment of politics was part of the culture of elite women in
eighteenth-century Philadelphia in which Penry grew to adulthood. Debo-
rah Norris assured her friend Sarah Wistar that, while she would express her
“sentiments freely” in letters, “Politicks . . . are not our province.” Many
disagreed. Wealthy Philadelphia women, tied by marriage or friendship to
political leaders, were expected to be “knowledgeable about current political
developments,” to form “their own opinions about issues,” and to discuss
these opinions with others. In different circumstances, Penry may well have
been an exemplary republican mother or wife, who, as Linda Kerber and Jan
Lewis have argued, influenced public affairs by fostering her husband’s vir-
tue, by educating her children to become virtuous citizens, or even at times
by “direct participation” in “public affairs” or “political ritual[s].” Penry’s
church discouraged this ambition—by men or by women—to engage in
56. Pasley, “Tyranny of Printers,” 11–12.

57. Norris, “A dear dear friend,” 502.
58. Fatherly, Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies, 133–34.
59. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 159, 277; Lewis, “Republican Wife.”

introduction 25
public affairs, a prohibition that Penry embraced. But her many years in
Moravian communities did not lead Penry to cease forming or expressing her
own opinions or to lose interest in local or global politics. When she traded
political information with Elizabeth Drinker in the 1790s, Penry reaffirmed
the elite class status she and Drinker had shared decades earlier.
Penry’s relentless curiosity, her diligent efforts to describe and interpret
what she saw for others, makes these letters indispensable to historians of
early America. But to treat these letters merely as records of early American
political culture is to miss Penry’s deep piety. John Woolf Jordan, the librar-
ian at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, used his editorial scalpel to
excise most of Penry’s enthusiastic devotion when he reprinted sixteen of her
letters in The Moravian from 1913 to 1915. He transformed Penry into a histo-
rian much like himself, curious about the political, cultural, and economic
life of the early republic. But Penry’s letters burst with personal testimonies
of her devotion to her Savior and record her lifelong efforts to eliminate self
so that she could receive grace. They reveal what it feels like to believe that,
when individuals become “gladly passive to let good be done to us” (as
Zinzendorf promised in a 1746 lecture preached in London), the grace to do
good works will follow.
Penry credited her Savior for all her accomplishments, convinced, as
Moravian piety taught, that she could not have achieved them on her own.
Penry told her Welsh relatives that it was impossible “to think even a good
thought—without his Assistance.” “There is no Merit in the Creature,” she
added. “Everything which renders us lovely, is his pure free gift alone” (Let-
ters 42 and 43). This deep belief both in natural depravity (“there is no Merit
in the Creature”) and in the necessity and availability of grace (which “renders
us lovely”) fills Penry’s letters. Natural depravity held that, due to the fall,
human beings—unaided, independent, alone—were unable to perform wor-
thy actions. “The most perfect thing which proceeds from man,” John Calvin’s
1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion had insisted, “is always polluted by
some stain.” Zinzendorf ’s lectures on the 1530 Augsburg Confession distilled
its second article—since “the fall of Adam, all men begotten in the natural
way are born with sin” and no “man can be justified before God by his own
strength”—into a memorable hymn that began, “I do believe, since Adam’s
Fall, / That Mankind are by Nature all / Nothing but Sin.” The workings
of grace, however, enable sinful human beings to think good thoughts, to
60. Zinzendorf, Nine Public Lectures, 70.

61. See Zinzendorf, “Third Sermon,” in Atwood, Collection of Sermons, 45.
62. Calvin, Institutes, 2:92; Zinzendorf, Twenty-One Discourses, 36.

perform good deeds, to live worthwhile lives. Such deeds, then, derive not
from “self ” but from the presence of another, of Christ, in one’s thoughts and
actions. This paradox meant that the only way to lay claim to thoughts or
actions that were “pleasing in his Sight” (Letter 69) was to disown agency for
them. The notion that only by eliminating self can one find the strength to
act worthily is not unique to Moravian piety; elsewhere I have analyzed its
pervasive presence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British thought.
But not every Protestant group lived these paradoxes to the same degree:
Moravians in settlement communities such as Bethlehem or Lititz, as
Atwood has shown in Community of the Cross, lived them intensely.
In Moravian communities, the rhythm of daily life (e.g., services, hymns,
litanies, festival days) reminded individuals that they were special recipients
of their Savior’s grace. Penry told friends in Bethlehem in 1768 that “every day
thro out the Year we have and injoy his near Presence in his Suffering Form”
(Letter 13). Penry’s spiritual memoir offers the individual version of this com-
munal assurance. In Lititz, she wrote:
the dear Savior taught me the hard way for the well-being of my poor
heart. This allowed me to see my inherent depravity even more. But I
still was not cured. Because I rejected admitting to my true nature, and
tried to help myself by my own means, I only slipped deeper into
despair. I continued on in this sad state until the Savior granted me the
grace to reveal my entire former journey of faith to our then Choir
Helper, Sister Maria Magdalena, in an open and truthful manner.
Even so it was difficult to recognize myself as such a totally lacking
sinner. (Appendix A)
Penry insists that self-reliance (“tried to help myself by my own means”) only
impeded her ability to receive grace. Even the decision to consult her choir
helper is not really hers: her Savior prompts it (“the Savior granted me the
grace to reveal my . . . journey of faith”). The hymns, litanies, and prayers
that structured daily life in Moravian communities aimed to ensure that this
grace remained unforgettable. The adjustments after Zinzendorf ’s death did
not eliminate these communal and individual structures that reinforced this
conviction. The intense focus on the crucified Christ’s wounds, the practice
that reminded Moravians of the grace they had received and thus of the
63. Gordon, Power of the Passive Self and “Glad Passivity.”

64. For conversations with choir helpers, see Faull, Speaking to Body and Soul.
65. Peucker, Time of Sifting; Atwood, “Deep in the Side of Jesus.”

introduction 27
source of the good works they performed, persisted throughout the eigh-
teenth century in communities such as Lititz and Bethlehem.
Penry’s piety shaped the way she understood the global events she
described with such curiosity and in such detail. Her religious millenarian-
ism fit all the happenings in early America and across the globe within a
narrative of the end of times. Like so many of her contemporaries, Penry was
obsessed with the fever of prophecy that the French Revolution and Euro-
pean war revived as the year 1800 approached. “That we are in the last Days,
I think beyond a doubt,” Penry wrote in 1794, “but how Many Years before
the end of those days—God only knows.” Penry’s confidence that “we live in
the last days” did not disappear once the year 1800 had passed (Letters 34 and
71). She watched events in America and in Europe to trace the approach of
these end times. Organizing all her observations is her conviction that noth-
ing happened without divine approval: “I am Confident God—and not
Chance—is the director of our Affairs” (Letter 57). Penry believed that “his-
tory was in the throes of great providential events,” and these contemporary
events found “their ultimate eschatological meaning” within a divine narra-
tive that Penry did not question. It was her responsibility to interpret what
she observed so that it conformed to the divine order she knew existed. This
story, of the preparation by the Savior for the final gathering, was the only
one worth following and telling.
On May 4, 1804, Penry wrote one last time in the diary of the single sisters’
choir. Another hand completed the entry for that date. Penry had been sick
off and on for six months, as her cousin Margaret Stocker in Philadelphia
knew. Although she “had been in bad health from the first of november,”
Penry had written Stocker encouraging letters in November, at Christmas,
and after New Year’s. On March 31, 1804, Penry told Stocker that “she had
been ill with a cramp in her breast an Inflamatory fever but the worst was
over.” She was absorbed in routine business, “settling her Books and drawing
out accounts belonging to the Society as she always did Every year” in May.
Penry’s last letter, describing severe health problems (Letter 74), did not
reach Stocker until after Penry’s death on May 17, 1804. Mary Penry had
lived sixty-eight busy years. Stocker heard the news the next day and wrote a
long letter to Penry’s surviving Welsh relatives: “it was a great Shock,” Stocker
assured Katherine Penry and Eliza Powell. Elizabeth Drinker heard on May
20 that Penry had died. A lengthy death notice appeared on May 23 in Poul-
son’s American Daily Advertiser, placed there, Drinker believed, by the Stock-
ers, and was picked up by several newspapers on America’s East Coast.
66. Bloch, Visionary Republic, 150–51. See also Juster, Doomsayers.

Figure 7 A page from the Lititz single sisters’ diary in 1804. Mary Penry wrote her last
entry on May 4. Another hand completed the diary entry for that day. Reproduced by
permission of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

introduction 29
Penry’s friend Anna Rosina Kliest, a single sister in Bethlehem, quoted the
published death notice in full in a letter to the Moravian missionary John
Heckewelder in Ohio.
Penry’s will disposed of the few personal effects she had possessed. Most
of this consisted of clothing and furniture (two chairs, two tables, and a desk),
but Penry also had books and pictures. The bulk of this small estate, includ-
ing the silver that she had used to host vespers (tea cups and saucers, tongs, a
strainer, a sugar dish), went to Anna Margareta Krieger, the steward (Vorste-
herin) of the single sisters’ house, for the choir’s use. Four teaspoons were
dispersed to friends. The Stockers arranged to have Penry’s silver watch,
promised to her niece in Wales, sent across the Atlantic to a merchant in
Bristol, who received it safely in February 1806 and transferred it to Eliza
Powell.
Penry’s most valuable legacy had already been distributed: her letters.
After Penry’s death many correspondents preserved the letters they had
received over the decades. John Woolf Jordan first rediscovered these letters
in the 1880s. He received the letters that Penry wrote to Elizabeth Drinker
from her great-grandson, Henry Drinker Biddle, and presented them to the
headmaster of Linden Hall, the girls’ school that was founded during Penry’s
time in Lititz. In 1911, visiting Britain, Jordan learned of Penry’s letters to
her Welsh cousins. He published bowdlerized versions of sixteen letters in
The Moravian. Readers enjoyed them and Jordan announced that he was
67. Mary Stocker to Katherine Penry, May 30, 1804, Penralley Collection 1399, NLW; May 20,
1804, Drinker, Diary, 3:1744 (Drinker heard both that gout and asthma caused MP’s death: May
23–24, 1804, Diary, 3:1745); Anna Rosina Kliest to John Heckewelder, June 2, 1804, GriderColl.f.19,
MAB; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, May 23, 1804, 3. See also Philadelphia’s Evening Post, May
23, 1804, 3; Harrisburg’s Oracle of Dauphin, June 2, 1804, 3; and Portland, Maine’s Eastern Argus,
September 27, 1804, 4. The notice read, “died, on the 16th inst. at Leditz, in Lancaster county, in the
69th year of her age, Miss Mary Penry. This Lady was born in Wales, and came young into this
county. Being early impressed with a sense of Religion, she retired to Bethlehem in the year 1757, and
afterwards removed to Leditz, where she spent the last thirty years of her life, in the peaceful enjoy-
ment of all the happiness, which arises from the cultivating and directing a vigorous understanding,
and the most benevolent affections to the noblest objects. In her occasional excursions from her
beloved retirement, she diff used cheerfulness and knowledge by her conversation among a numerous
circle of acquaintances. She lived likewise by her letters in a state of friendship with many learned and
pious persons of different denominations in Europe, and different parts of America.” The notice
concluded with an “extract from one of her last letters,” which appears as Letter 73 in this volume.
68. Mary Penry, Last Will and Testament, August 1, 1803, Will Book H-504, Microfi lm 299F;
Estate Inventory, July 23, 1804, Inv 1804 F001 P; Administrative Account, December 13, 1804, AdAcct
1804 F001 P, all in LCHS. Margaret Stocker wrote that MP’s “cloaths [went] to Some of the Singel
Sister in the house with her and a small book of Sermonds & a gold ring to me, Her Bed chairs
bookcase &c to be Sold and the money to be for the benefit of their Sick poor.” Margaret Stocker to
Katherine Penry, April 15, 1805, Penralley Collection 1400, NLW.
69. Thomas Daniel to Katherine Penry, February 6, 1806, Penralley Collection 1403, NLW.
70. John Woolf Jordan to C. D. Kreider, September 17, 1903, Linden Hall Archives.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
These were substantials, and there were jocose extravagances to
chorus them. One heard of a pair of cuff-links, diamond and emerald
studded, purchased to order at the price of a king’s ransom; of a
sybaritic Fortunatus who reveled luxuriously in night-shirts at three
thousand dollars a dozen; of men who scorned the humble “chip” in
the crowded gaming rooms and played with twenty-dollar gold
pieces for counters.
Philip saw and heard and was conscious of penetrating inward
stirrings. Was the totting-up of figures all he was good for? True,
there were money-making opportunities even at the railroad desk;
chances to lend his thrifty savings at usurious interest to potential
prospectors; chances to make quick turn-overs on small margins,
and with certain profits, in real-estate; invitations to get in on
“ground floors” in many promising enterprises, not excepting the
carefully guarded inside stock pool of the railroad company he was
working for. But the inward stirrings were not for these ventures in
the commonplace; they were even scornful of them. Money-lending,
trading, stockjobbing—these were for the timid. For the venturer
unafraid there was a braver and a richer field.
“How much experience does a fellow have to have to go
prospecting?” he asked of Middleton, one day when the figure-
adding had grown to be an anæsthetizing monotony hard to be
borne.
Middleton grinned mockingly. “Hello!” he said. “It’s got you at last,
has it?”
“I asked a plain question. What’s the answer?—if you know it.”
“Experience? Nine-tenths of the fools who are chasing into the hills
don’t know free gold from iron pyrites, or carbonates from any other
kind of black sand. It’s mostly bull luck when they find anything.”
“Yet they are finding it,” Philip put in.
“You hear of those who find it. The Lord knows, they make racket
enough spending the proceeds. But you never hear much about the
ninety-nine in a hundred who don’t find it.”
“Just the same, according to your tell, one man’s chance seems to
be about as good as another’s. I believe I’d like to have a try at it,
Middleton. Want to go along?”
“Not in a thousand years!” was the laughing refusal. “I’ll take mine
straight, and in the peopled cities. I’ve got a girl back in Ohio, and
I’m going after her one of these days—after this wild town settles
down and quits being so rude and boisterous.”
Philip looked his desk-mate accusingly in the eye.
“It’s an even bet that you don’t,” he said calmly.
“Why won’t I?”
“I saw you last night-down at the corner of Holladay and
Seventeenth.”
Middleton, lately a country-town bank clerk in his native Ohio, but
who was now beginning to answer the invitation of a pair of rather
moist eyes and lips that were a trifle too full, tried to laugh it off.
“You mean the ‘chippy’ I was with? I’m no monk, Philly; never set up
to be. Besides, I’m willing to admit that I may have had one too
many whiskey sours last night. Cheese it, and tell me what’s on your
mind.”
“I’ve already told you. I think I’ll try my luck in the hills, if I can find
a partner.”
“Good-by,” grunted Middleton, turning back to his tonnage sheet. “As
for the partner part, all you have to do is to chase down to the
station and shoot your invitation at the first likely looking fellow who
gets off the next incoming train. He’ll be a rank tenderfoot, of
course, but that won’t make any difference: there’ll be a pair of you
—both innocents. Why, say, Philly; I’ll bet you’ve still got your first
drink of red liquor waiting for you! Come, now—own up; haven’t
you?”
“I should hope so,” said Philip austerely. “I didn’t come all the way
out here to make a fool of myself.”
This time Middleton’s grin was openly derisive.
“My, my!” he jeered. “The spirit moves me to prophesy. I know your
kind, Philly—up one side and down the other. When you let go, I
hope I’ll be there to see. It’ll be better than a three-ring circus.
Wine, women and song, and all the rest of it. Speaking of women
——”
“You needn’t,” Philip cut in shortly; and he got up to answer the
auditor’s desk bell.
The process of securing a partner for a prospecting trip was scarcely
the simple matter that Middleton’s gibing suggestion had made it.
Though there were many haphazard matings achieved hastily at the
outfitting moment, a goodly proportion of the treasure hunters were
coming in pairs and trios hailing from a common starting point in the
east. In spite of the free-and-easy levelling of the conventions, Philip
found it difficult to make acquaintances, his shell of provincial
reserve remaining unchipped, though he tried hard enough to break
it. Besides, he felt that he was justified in trying to choose
judiciously. He could conceive of no experience more devastating
than to be isolated in the wilderness for weeks and perhaps months
with an ill-chosen partner for his only companion. The very intimacy
of such an association would make it unbearable.
It was while he was still hesitating that a small duty urged itself
upon him. It concerned the Mississippi family with the death-
threatened husband and father. In a city where all were strangers he
had fully intended keeping in touch with the Dabneys, if only to be
ready to offer what small help a passing acquaintance might in case
the threatened catastrophe should climax. Since he would shortly be
leaving Denver, the duty pressed again, and he set apart an evening
for the tracing of the Mississippians, going first to the American
House to make inquiries.
Fortunately for his purpose, one of the hotel clerks, himself a
Southerner, remembered the Dabneys. They had remained but a few
days in the hotel; were now, so the clerk believed, camping in one of
the tent colonies out on California or Stout Streets somewhere
between Twentieth and Twenty-third. Yes, Captain Dabney had been
in pretty bad shape, but it was to be assumed that he was still living.
The clerk had been sufficiently interested to keep track of the
obituary notices in the newspapers, and the Dabney name had not
appeared in any of them. Inquiry among the tenters would probably
enable Philip to find them.
Reproaching himself for his prolonged negligence, Philip set out to
extend his search to the tent colonies. It was after he had reached
the more sparsely built-up district, and was crossing a vacant square
beyond the better-lighted streets, that a slender figure, seemingly
materializing out of the ground at his feet, rose up to confront him,
a pistol was thrust into his face, and he heard the familiar formula:
“Hands up—and be quick about it!”
It is probably a fact that the element of shocked surprise, no less
than the natural instinct of self-preservation, accounts for the easy
success of the majority of hold-ups. Sudden impulse automatically
prompts obedience, and the chance of making any resistance is lost.
But impulsiveness was an inconsequent part of Philip’s equipment.
Quite coolly measuring his chances, and well assured that he had a
considerable advantage in avoirdupois, he knocked the threatening
weapon aside and closed in a quick grapple with the highwayman.
He was not greatly surprised when he found that his antagonist,
though slightly built, was as wiry and supple as a trained acrobat;
but in the clinching struggle it was weight that counted, and when
the brief wrestling match ended in a fall, the hold-up man was
disarmed and spread-eagled on the ground and Philip was sitting on
him.
When he could get his breath the vanquished one laughed.
“Made a complete, beautiful and finished fizzle of it, d-didn’t I?” he
gasped. “Let me tell you, my friend, it isn’t half so easy as it is made
to appear in the yellow-back novels.”
“What the devil do you mean—trying to hold me up with a gun?”
Philip demanded angrily.
“Why—if you must know, I meant to rob you; to take and
appropriate to my own base uses that which I have not, and which
you presumably have. Not having had the practice which makes
perfect, I seem to have fallen down. Would you mind sitting a little
farther back on me? I could breathe much better if you would.”
Philip got up and picked up the dropped weapon.
“I suppose I ought to shoot you with your own gun,” he snapped;
and the reply to that was another chuckling laugh.
“You couldn’t, you know,” said the highwayman, sitting up. “It’s
perfectly harmless—empty, as you may see for yourself if you’ll
break it. You were quite safe in ignoring it.”
Philip regarded him curiously.
“What kind of a hold-up are you, anyway?” he asked.
“The rottenest of amateurs, as you have just proved upon my poor
body. I thank you for the demonstration. It decides a nice question
for me. I hesitated quite some time before I could tip the balance
between this, and going into a restaurant, ordering and consuming a
full meal, and being kicked out ignominiously for non-payment
afterward. This seemed the more decent thing to do, but it is pretty
evident that I lack something in the way of technique. Wouldn’t you
say so?”
“I should say that you are either a fool or crazy,” said Philip bluntly.
“Wrong, both ways from the middle,” was the jocular retort. “At the
present moment I am merely an empty stomach; and empty
stomachs, as you may have observed, are notoriously lacking in any
moral sense. May I get up?”
“Yes,” said Philip; and when the man was afoot: “Now walk ahead of
me to that street lamp on the corner. I want to have a look at you.”
What the street lamp revealed was what he was rather expecting to
see; a handsome, boyish face a trifle thin and haggard, eyes that
were sunken a little, but with an unextinguished smile in them, a
fairly good chin and jaw, a mouth just now wreathing itself in an
impish grin under his captor’s frowning scrutiny.
“Umph!—you don’t look like a very hard case,” Philip decided.
“Oh, but I am, I assure you. I’ve been kicked out of two respectable
colleges, dropped from the home club for conduct unbecoming a
gentleman, and finally turned out of house and home by a justifiably
irate father. Can I say more?”
“What are you doing in Denver?”
“You saw what I was trying to do a few minutes ago. The outcome
dovetails accurately with everything else I have attempted since I
parted with the final dollar of the even thousand with which I was
disinherited. Failure seems to be my baptismal name.”
“What is your name?”
“Henry Wigglesworth Bromley. Please don’t smile at the middle third
of it. That is a family heirloom—worse luck. But to the matter in
hand: I’m afraid I’m detaining you. Shall I—‘mog,’ is the proper
frontier word, I believe—shall I mog along down-town and surrender
myself to the police?”
“Would you do that if I should tell you to?”
“Why not, if you require it? You are the victor, and to the victors
belong the spoils—such as they are. If you hunger for vengeance,
you shall have it. Only I warn you in advance that it won’t be
complete. If the police lock me up, they will probably feed me, so
you won’t be punishing me very savagely.”
For once in a way Philip yielded to an impulse, a prompting that he
was never afterward able to trace to any satisfactory source.
Dropping the captured revolver into his coat pocket, he pressed a
gold piece into the hand of the amateur hold-up.
“Say that I’ve bought your gun and go get you a square meal,” he
said, trying to say it gruffly. “Afterward, if you feel like it, go and sit
in the lobby of the American House for your after-dinner smoke. I’m
not making it mandatory. If you’re not there when I get back, it will
be all right.”
“Thank you; while I’m eating I’ll think about that potential
appointment. If I can sufficiently forget the Wigglesworth in my
name I may keep the tryst, but don’t bank on it. I may—with a full-
fed stomach—have a resurgence of the Wigglesworth family pride,
and in that case——”
“Good-night,” said Philip abruptly, and went his way toward the tent
colony in the next open square, wondering again where the impulse
to brother this impish but curiously engaging highwayman came
from.
III
In circumstances in which it would have been easy enough to fail,
Philip found the family he was looking for almost at once; and it was
the young woman with the dark eyes and hair and the enticing
Southland voice and accent who slipped between the flaps of the
lighted tent when he made his presence known.
“Oh, Mr. Trask—is it you?” she exclaimed, as the dim lamplight
filtering through the canvas enabled her to recognize him. “This is
kind of you, I’m sure. We’ve been wondering if we should ever see
you again. I can’t imagine how you were ever able to find us.”
Philip, rejoicing in the softly smothered “r’s” of her speech, explained
soberly. It was not so difficult. He had gone first to the hotel; and
once in the tented square, a few inquiries had sufficed.
“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in,” she hastened to say. “You see, there
isn’t so awfully much room in a tent, and—and the children are just
going to bed. Would you mind sitting out here?”
There was a bench on the board platform that served as a dooryard
for the tent, and they sat together on that. For the first few minutes
Philip had an attack of self-consciousness that made him boil
inwardly with suppressed rage. His human contacts for the past few
weeks—or months, for that matter—had been strictly masculine, and
he had never been wholly at ease with women, save those of his
own family. Stilted inquiries as to how the sick Captain was getting
along, and how they all liked Denver and the West, and how they
thought the climate and the high altitude were going to agree with
them, were as far as he got before a low laugh, with enough
mockery in it to prick him sharply, interrupted him.
“Excuse me,” she murmured, “but it’s so deliciously funny to see you
make such hard work of it. Are there no girls in the part of
Yankeeland you come from?”
“Plenty of them,” he admitted; “but they are not like you.”
“Oh!” she laughed. “Is that a compliment, or the other thing?”
“It is just the plain truth. But the trouble isn’t with girls—it’s with
me. I guess I’m not much of a ladies’ man.”
“I’m glad you’re not; I can’t imagine anything more deadly. Are you
still working for the railroad?”
“Just at present, yes. But I’ll be quitting in a few days. I’m going to
try my luck in the mountains—prospecting.”
“But—I thought you said you wouldn’t!”
“I did; but I was younger then than I am now.”
She laughed again. “All of six weeks younger. But I’m glad you are
going. If the Captain could get well, and I were a man, I’d go, too.”
Philip was on the point of saying that he wished she were a man and
would go with him; but upon second thought he concluded he didn’t
wish it. Before he could straighten out the tangle of the first and
second thoughts she was asking him if he knew anything about
minerals and mining.
“Nothing at all. But others who don’t know any more than I do are
going, and some of them are finding what they hoped to find.”
“It’s in the air,” she said. “You hear nothing but ‘strikes’ and ‘leads’
and ‘mother veins’ and ‘bonanzas.’ Lots of the people in these tents
around us are here because some member of the family is sick, but
they all talk excitedly about the big fortunes that are being made,
and how Tom or Dick or Harry has just come in with a haversack full
of ‘the pure quill,’ whatever that may mean.”
“You haven’t been hearing any more of it than I have,” said Philip.
“Not as much, I think. The town is mad with the mining fever. I’m
only waiting until I can find a suitable partner.”
“That ought not to be very hard—with everybody wanting to go.”
Philip shook his head. “I guess I’m not built right for mixing with
people. I can’t seem to chum in with just anybody that comes
along.”
“You oughtn’t to,” she returned decisively. Then, again with the
mocking note in her voice: “They say the prospectors often have to
fight to hold their claims after they have found them: you ought to
pick out some big, strong fighting man for a partner, don’t you
think?”
Philip was glad the canvas-filtered lamplight was too dim to let her
see the flush her words evoked.
“You are thinking of that day on the train, and how I let the husky
miner take your part when I should have done it myself? I’m not
such a coward as that. I was trying to get out of my seat when the
miner man got ahead of me. I want you to believe that.”
“Of course I’ll believe it.” Then, quite penitently: “You must forgive
me for being rude again: I simply can’t help saying the meanest
things, sometimes. Still, you know, I can’t imagine you as a fighter,
really.”
“Can’t you?” said Philip; and then he boasted: “I had a fight with a
hold-up on the way out here this evening—and got the best of him,
too.” Whereupon he described with dry humor Henry Wigglesworth
Bromley’s attempt to raise the price of a square meal; the brief
battle and its outcome.
“You haven’t told all of it,” she suggested, when he paused with his
refusal to accept Bromley’s offer to arrest himself on a charge of
attempted highway robbery.
“What part have I left out?”
“Just the last of it, I think. You gave the robber some money to buy
the square meal—I’m sure you did.”
“You are a witch!” Philip laughed. “That is exactly what I did do. I
don’t know why I did it, but I did.”
“I know why,” was the prompt reply. “It was because you couldn’t
help it. The poor boy’s desperation appealed to you—it appeals to
me just in your telling of it. He isn’t bad; he is merely good stock
gone to seed. Couldn’t you see that?”
“Not as clearly as you seem to. But he did appear to be worth
helping a bit.”
“Ah; that is the chord I was trying to touch. You ought to help him
some more, Mr. Trask. Don’t you reckon so?”
“‘Mr. Trask’ wouldn’t, but perhaps ‘Philip’ would,” he suggested
mildly.
“Well, ‘Philip,’ then. Don’t you see how brave he is?—to laugh at
himself and all his misfortunes, the hardships his wildness has
brought upon him? You say you are looking for a prospecting
partner; why don’t you take him?”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Certainly I mean it. It might result in two good things. If you could
get him off in the mountains by himself, and live with him, and make
him work hard, you might make a real man of him.”
“Yes?” said Philip. “That is one of the two good things. What is the
other?”
“The other is what it might do for you. Or am I wrong about that?”
“No,” he said, after a little pause. “I still think you are a witch. You’ve
found out that I live in a shell, and it’s so. I guess I was born that
way. You think the shell would crack if I should take hold of a man
like this Bromley and try to brother him?”
“I am sure it would,” she replied gravely. “It couldn’t help cracking.”
Then, as a low-toned call came from the inside of the tent: “Yes,
mummie, dear,—I’m coming.”
Philip got up and held out his hand.
“I am sorry I’m going away, because I’d like to be within call if you
should need me. If you should move into a house, or leave Denver,
will you let me know? A note addressed to me in care of the railroad
office will be either forwarded or held until I come back.”
“I’ll write,” she promised, and the quick veiling of the dark eyes told
him that she knew very well what he meant by her possible need.
“And about this young scapegrace who tried to hold me up: what
you have suggested never occurred to me until you spoke of it. But
if you think I ought to offer to take him along into the mountains, I
don’t know but I’ll do it. It wouldn’t be any crazier than the things a
lot of other people are doing in this mining-mad corner of the world
just now.”
“Oh, you mustn’t take me too seriously. I have no right to tell you
what you should do. But I did have a glimpse of what it might mean.
I’m going to wish you good luck—the very best of luck. If you really
want to be rich, I hope you’ll find one of these beautiful ‘bonanzas’
people are talking about; find it and live happily ever after. Good-by.”
“Good-by,” said Philip; and when she disappeared behind the tent
flap, he picked his way out of the campers’ square and turned his
steps townward.
It was after he had walked the five squares westward on Champa
and the six northward down Seventeenth, and was turning into
Blake, with the American House only a block distant, that a girlish
figure slipped out of a doorway shadow, caught step with him, and
slid a caressing arm under his with a murmured, “You look
lonesome, baby, and I’m lonesome, too. Take me around to Min’s
and stake me to a bottle of wine. I’m so thirsty I don’t know where
I’m going to sleep to-night.”
Philip freed himself with a twist that had in it all the fierce virtue of
his Puritan ancestry. Being fresh from a very human contact with a
young woman of another sort, this appeal of the street-girl was like
a stumbling plunge into muddy water. Backing away from the
temptation which, he told himself hotly, was no temptation at all, he
walked on quickly, and had scarcely recovered his balance when he
entered the lobby of the hotel. Almost immediately he found
Bromley, sprawled in one of the lounging chairs, deep in the
enjoyment of a cigar which he waved airily as he caught sight of
Philip.
“Benedicite, good wrestler! Pull up a chair and rest your face and
hands,” he invited. Then, with a cheerful smile: “Why the pallid
countenance? You look as though you’d just seen a ghost. Did some
other fellow try to hold you up?”
Philip’s answering smile was a twisted grimace. “No; it was a
woman, this time.”
“Worse and more of it. Lots of little devils in skirts chivvying around
this town. Too many men fools roaming the streets with money in
their pockets. ‘Wheresoever the body is, there will the eagles be
gathered together’—only they’re not exactly eagles; they are birds of
another feather. I know, because they clawed me a bit before my
wallet went dry.”
“You were one of the fools?” said Philip sourly.
“You’d know it without my telling you. But to the law and the
testimony. You see, the Wigglesworth family pride didn’t prevent me
from keeping your kindly hint in mind—and I’ve obeyed it. Where do
we begin?”
“Suppose we begin where we left off,” said Philip guardedly. “Is there
any decent ambition left in you?”
Bromley took time to consider, and when he replied he was shaking
his head doubtfully.
“To be perfectly frank about it, I’m not sure there has ever been
anything worthy the high sounding name of ambition. You see, there
is quite a lot of Bromley property scattered about in my home town
—which is Philadelphia, if you care to know—and the income from it
has heretofore proved fatal to anything like decent ambition on the
part of a play-boy.”
“Your property?” Philip queried.
“Oh, dear, no; the governor’s. But he hasn’t kept too tight a hand on
the purse strings; not tight enough, if we are to judge from the
effects—the present horrible example being the most disastrous of
the same. As I intimated on the scene of my latest fiasco, I
stretched the rubber band once too often and it snapped back at me
with a disinheriting thousand-dollar check attached. That, my dear
benefactor, is my poor tale, poorly told. You see before you what
might have been a man, but what probably—most probably—never
will be a man.”
“Of course, if you are willing to let it go at that——” said Philip,
leaving the sentence unfinished.
“You mean that I ought to pitch in and do something useful? My
dear Mr. Good-wrestler——”
“My name is Trask,” Philip cut in shortly.
“Well, then, my dear Trask, I have never learned how to do useful
things. One has to learn, I believe, if it’s only washing dishes in a
cheap restaurant, or chopping wood. I should inevitably break the
dishes, or let the axe slip and chop my foot.”
Philip made a gesture of impatience.
“I had a proposal to make to you, but it seems that it’s no use. I am
about to strike out for the mountains, to try my luck prospecting. A
friend of yours, whom you have never seen or even heard of,
suggested that you might want to go along—as my partner.”
Bromley straightened himself in his chair and the mocking smile died
out of his boyish eyes.
“A friend of mine, you say? I had some friends while my thousand
lasted, but I haven’t any now.”
“Yes, you have at least one; though, as I have said, you have never
seen or heard of her.”
The play-boy sank back into the depths of his chair.
“Ah, I see; a woman, and you told her about me. Am I such an
object of pity as that, Trask?”
Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his
hand on the play-boy’s knee.
“It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.”
“Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so
infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so
much lower when they let go. This angel you speak of—is she yours,
Trask?”
“No; only an acquaintance. I have met her only twice. But you
haven’t said what you think of my proposal. It is made in good
faith.”
“Don’t you see how impossible it is?”
“Why is it impossible?”
“A partnership presupposes mutual contributions. I have nothing to
contribute; not even skill with a miner’s pick.”
“You have yourself and your two hands—which are probably not
more unskilled than mine, for the kind of work we’d have to do.”
“But the outfit—the grub-stake?”
“I have money enough to carry the two of us through the summer. If
we strike something, you can pay me back out of your half of the
stake.”
For quite a long time Bromley sat with his head thrown back, and
with the half-burned cigar, which had gone out and was cold and
dead, clamped between his teeth. And his answer, when he made it,
was strictly in character.
“What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold you up
weeks ago, Trask—while I had some few ravellings of the thousand
left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the golden
fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t
disappoint the angel.”
IV
The August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-
tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot
through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast
celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of
camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as
prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock
slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a
hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running
water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream
brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the
stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the
smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night
camp briskly begun.
Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been
struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the
greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected
diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental
Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma, and
finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned
tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their
own disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward,
past Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the
range over a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new
ground on the western side of the Divide.
“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less
shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten
their supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire.
“I think we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to
be thankful for.”
Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl
of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life
and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search
was doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack
a roof over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and
bacon cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar
and its accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted
trousers and top boots had come a gradual change in habits and
outlook, and—surest distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot—a more
or less unconscious aping of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had
grown dull after the first week or two, he had let his beard grow;
and for the single clerkly cigar smoked leisurely after the evening
meal, he had substituted a manly pipe filled with shavings from a
chewing plug.
Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’
abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had
put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes
and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were
as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain
easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also,
though his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap
of looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second
day.
“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we
have, perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone
over and find a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the
pipe-clearing pause.
“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to
speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it
would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred
in the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”
“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your
vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”
“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six
months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give
us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”
“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple
of months,” Philip countered.
“Don’t I know it? Attrition—rubbing up against the right sort of thing
—will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of
nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on
me; I’m coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even
times when I can almost begin to look back with horror upon my
young life wasted.”
“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted
comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”
“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right
perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed
the activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly
advised to consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the
ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her
lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile
chasings to and fro—up one side of a blade of grass and down the
other, over a pebble and then under it—don’t impress the human
beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a
frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants
may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent
enough to philosophize about us.”
“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”
“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful fever,’
Elizabethan Billy calls it—and he knew. But in one way we have the
advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of
grass and pebbles are all different.”
“How, different?”
“We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which
is never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll
never be able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk,
for example.”
“Maybe not. And you?”
“God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues
on me—suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll see
what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look
forward to.”
“Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again—maggoty, I
mean. Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look
after the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.”
Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind.
“Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short twelve-
month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking,
shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals,
and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet I
should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he
went to valet the burros.
The first day after their arrival in the western valley was spent in
exploring, and they finally settled upon a gulch not far from their
camp of the night before as the most promising place in which to
dig. Though they had as yet mastered only the bare rudiments of a
trained prospector’s education, the two summer months had given
them a modicum of experience; enough to enable them to know
roughly what to look for, and how to recognize it when they found it.
The gulch in which they began operations was a miniature canyon,
and the favored site was indicated by the half-hidden outcropping of
a vein of brownish material which they could trace for some distance
up the steep slope of the canyon wall. During the day’s explorations
they had frequently tested the sands of the stream bed for gold
“colors,” washing the sand miner-fashion in their frying pan, and it
was upon the hint given by the “colors” that they had pitched upon
the gulch location. Below the gulch mouth microscopic flakes of gold
appeared now and again in the washings. But the sands above were
barren.
“It looks as if we may have found something worth while, this time,”
Philip hazarded, after they had cleared the rock face to reveal the
extent of the vein. “The ‘colors’ we’ve been finding in the creek sand
come from a lode somewhere, and this may be the mother vein.
We’ll put the drills and powder to it to-morrow and see what
happens.”
Accordingly, for a toilsome fortnight they drilled and blasted in the
gulch, and by the end of that time the prospect had developed into a
well-defined vein of quartz wide enough to admit the opening of a
working tunnel. Having no equipment for making field tests, they
could only guess at the value of their discovery, but the indications
were favorable. The magnifying glass showed flecks and dustings of
yellow metal in selected specimens of the quartz; and, in addition,
the ore body was of the character they had learned to distinguish as
“free milling”—vein-matter from which the gold can be extracted by
the simplest and cheapest of the crushing processes.
Taking it all in all, they had good reason to be hopeful; and on the
final day of the two weeks of drilling and blasting they skipped the
noonday meal to save time and were thus enabled to fire the
evening round of shots in the shallow tunnel just before sunset. A
hasty examination of the spoil blown out removed all doubt as to the
character of the material in which they were driving. The vein was
gold-bearing quartz, beyond question; how rich, they had no means
of determining; but there were tiny pockets—lenses—in which the
free metal was plainly visible without the aid of the magnifier.
That night, before their camp fire, they held a council of war.
Though it seemed more than likely that the lode was a rich one,
they were now brought face to face with the disheartening fact that
the mere ownership of a potential gold mine is only the first step in
a long and uphill road to fortune. In the mining regions it is a
common saying that the owner of a silver prospect needs a gold
mine at his back to enable him to develop it, and the converse is
equally true.
“Well,” Bromley began, after the pipes had been lighted, “it seems
we’ve got something, at last. What do we do with it?”
“I wish I knew, Harry,” was the sober reply. “If the thing turns out to
be as good as it looks, we’ve got the world by the tail—or we would
have if we could only figure out some way to hold on. But we can’t
hold on and develop it; that is out of the question. We have no
capital, and we are a good many mountain miles from a stamp-mill.
Unless the lode is richer than anything we’ve ever heard of, the ore
wouldn’t stand the cost of jack-freighting to a mill.”
“That says itself,” Bromley agreed. “But if we can’t develop the thing,
what is the alternative?”
“There is only one. If our map is any good, and if we have figured
out our location with any degree of accuracy, we are about thirty
miles, as the crow flies, from Leadville—which will probably mean
forty or fifty the way we’d have to go to find a pass over the range.
We have provisions enough to stake us on the way out, but not very
much more than enough. I cut into the last piece of bacon to-night
for supper.”
“All right; say we head for Leadville. We’d have to do that anyway, to
record our discovery in the land office. What next?”
“Assays,” said Philip. “We’ll take a couple of sacks of the quartz along
and find out what we’ve got. If the assays make a good showing,
we’ll have something to sell, and it will go hard with us if we can’t
find some speculator in the big camp who will take a chance and
buy our claim.”
“What?—sell out, lock, stock and barrel for what we can get, and
then stand aside and see somebody come in here and make a
million or so that ought to be ours?” Bromley burst out. “Say, Philip
—that would be death by slow torture!”
“I know,” Philip admitted. “It is what the poor prospector gets in nine
cases out of ten because, being poor, he has to take it. If we had a
mine, instead of a mere prospect hole, we might hope to be able to
capitalize it; but as it is—well, you know what’s in the common
purse. My savings are about used up; we came in on a shoe-string,
in the beginning.”
“Yes, but, land of love, Philip!—to have a thing, like this may turn
out to be, right in our hands, and then have to sell it, most likely for
a mere song! ... why, we’d never live long enough to get over it,
neither one of us!”
Philip shook his head. “It’s tough luck, I’ll admit; but what else is
there to do?”
Bromley got up and kicked a half burnt log into the heart of the fire.
“How nearly broke are we, Phil?” he asked.
The financing partner named the sum still remaining in the
partnership purse, which, as he had intimated, was pitifully small.
“You said, just now, if we had a mine to sell, instead of a bare
prospect,” Bromley went on.... “We’ve got nerve, and two pairs of
hands. Suppose we stay with it and make it a mine? I know good
and well what that will mean: a freezing winter in the mountains,
hardships till you can’t rest, half starvation, maybe. Just the same,
I’m game for it, if you are.”
Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very
beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of
grateful surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations,
willingness to share hard labor—a loyal partner in all that the word
implied. Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship,
as his Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed
and measured the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had
been many weeks together he was honest enough to admit that
Bromley was as tempered steel to his own roughly forged iron; that
it had been merely a lack of an adequate object in life that had
made him a spendthrift and a derelict.
“You’d tackle a winter here in these mountains rather than let go?”
he said, after the refilled pipe was alight. “It will be hell, Harry. You
remember what those fellows in Chalk Creek told us about the
snows on this side of the range.”
“I’m discounting everything but the kind of hell that will be ours if
we should let go and see somebody else come in and reap where
we’ve sown.”
“All right; let’s see what we’ve got to buck up against. First, we’ll
have to go out for the recording, the assays, and the winter’s
provisions. We’d have to buy at least one more burro to freight the
grub-stake in; and then one of us will have to take the jacks out for
the winter. They’d starve to death here. All this is going to take time,
and the summer is already gone. And that isn’t all; we’ll have to
build a cabin and cut the winter’s wood. It will be a fierce race
against time to get holed in before we’re snowed under.”
“Still I’m game,” declared Bromley stoutly. “If it turns out that we
have something worth fighting for—and the assays will say yes or no
to that—I’m for the fight.”
Philip scowled amiably at the transformed play-boy. “You nervy little
rat!” he exclaimed in gruff affection. “Think you can back me down
on a fighting proposition? I’ll call your bluff. We’ll put in one more
day setting things to rights, and then we’ll pull out for Leadville and
that starvation winter grub-stake.”
“Setting things to rights,” as Philip phrased it, did not ask for an
entire day. By noon they had cached their tools and what remained
of the stock of provisions after enough had been reserved to supply
them on the journey; had filled a couple of ore sacks with samples
for the assay; and had paced off and re-staked their claim, posting it
with the proper notice and christening it the “Little Jean,”—this at
Philip’s suggestion, though he did not tell Bromley why he chose this
particular name.
With nothing more to be done, Philip was impatiently eager to break
camp at once, but Bromley pleaded for a few hours’ rest.
“It’s Sunday,” he protested. “Can’t you possess your soul in patience
for one little afternoon? This bonanza of ours—which may not be a
bonanza, after all—won’t run away. I’d like to sleep up a bit before
we strike out to climb any more mountains.”
The impatient one consented reluctantly to the delay; and while
Bromley, wearier than he cared to admit, slept for the better part of
the afternoon, Philip dumped the sacked ore and spent the time
raking over the pile of broken rock and vein-matter blasted out of
the shallow opening, selecting other samples which he thought
might yield a fairer average of values. Beside the camp fire that
evening he stretched himself out with the two sacks of ore for a
back rest; and Bromley, awake now and fully refreshed, noted the
back rest and smiled.
“Like the feel of it, even in the rough, don’t you, Phil?” he jested.
Then: “I’m wondering if this treasure hunt hasn’t got under your skin
in more ways than one. At first, you were out for the pure
excitement of the chase; but now you are past all that; you are plain
money-hungry.”
“Well, who isn’t?” Philip demanded, frowning into the heart of the
fire. “Still, you’re wrong. It isn’t the money so much, as what it will
buy.”
“What will it buy—more than you’ve always had? You won’t be able
to eat any more or any better food, or wear any more clothes, or get
more than one tight roof to shelter you at a time,—needs you have
always had supplied, or have been able to supply for yourself.”
Getting no reply to this, he went on. “Suppose this strike of ours
should pan out a million or so—which is perhaps as unlikely as
anything in the world—what would you do with the money?”
For the moment Philip became a conventional, traditional worshipper
at the altar of thrift.
“I think I should emulate the example of the careful dog with a
bone; go and dig a safe hole and bury most of it.”
Bromley’s laugh came back in cachinnating echoes from the gulch
cliffs.
“Not on your life you wouldn’t, Philip. I can read your horoscope
better than that. If it does happen to happen that we’ve really made
a ten-strike, I can see you making the good old welkin ring till the
neighbors won’t be able to hear themselves think, for the noise
you’ll make.”
“I don’t know why you should say anything like that,” Philip objected
morosely.
“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be
able to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in
mind.”
Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar
prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I
know your kind....” Middleton had said. What was there about his
kind that made other people so sure that the good thread of self-
control had been left out in his weaving?
“I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case
it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.”
“I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could
answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I
wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And
they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything
within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.”
Philip looked at his watch.
“Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m
turning in.”
In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start
was made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though
rather uncertain as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them
to locate their valley and its small river, and their nearest practicable
route to Leadville appeared to be by way of the stream to its
junction with a larger river, and then eastward up the valley of the
main stream, which the map showed as heading in the gulches
gashing the western shoulder of Mount Massive.
A day’s tramping behind the two diminutive pack beasts brought
them to the larger stream, and the third evening found them
zigzagging up the slopes of the great chain which forms the
watershed backbone of the continent. Philip had been hastening the
slow march of the burros all day, hoping to reach the pass over the
range before night. But darkness overtook them when they were
approaching timber line and they were forced to camp. It was at this
high camp that they had the unique experience of melting snow
from a year-old snowbank at the end of summer to water the burros
and to make coffee over their camp fire. And even with double
blankets and the tarpaulins from the packs, they slept cold.
Pushing on in the first graying light of the Thursday dawn, they
came to the most difficult stretch of mountain climbing they had yet
encountered: a bare, boulder-strewn steep, gullied by rifts and
gulches in which the old snow was still lying. At the summit of the
rugged pass, which they reached, after many breathing halts, a little
before noon, there was a deep drift, sand-covered and treacherous,
and through the crust of this the animals broke and floundered, and
finally did what over-driven burros will always do—got down and
tried to roll their packs off. It was then that Philip flew into a rage
and swore savagely at the jacks; at which Bromley laughed.
“You’re coming along nicely, Phil,” he chuckled. “A few more weeks
of this, and you’ll be able to qualify for a post-graduate course in the
higher profanities. Not but what you are fairly fluent, as it is.”
Philip made no reply; he was silent through the scarcely less difficult
descent into a wide basin on the eastern front of the range. On the
lower level the going was easier, and in the latter half of the
afternoon they came to the farther lip of the high-pitched basin from
which they could look down into the valley of the Arkansas; into the
valley and across it to a distant, shack-built camp city spreading
upward from a series of gulch heads over swelling hills with mighty
mountains for a background—the great carbonate camp whose fame
was by this time penetrating to the remotest hamlet in the land. A
yellow streak winding up one of the swelling hills marked the course
of the stage road, and on it, in a cloud of golden dust, one of the
rail-head stages drawn by six horses was worming its way upward
from the river valley.
“Think we can make it before dark?” Bromley asked.
“We’ve got to make it,” Philip declared doggedly; adding: “I’m not
going to wait another day before I find out what we’ve got in that
hole we’ve been digging. Come on.”
The slogging march was resumed, but distances are marvelously
deceptive in the clear air of the altitudes, and darkness was upon
them before the lights of the big camp came in sight over the last of
the hills. Bromley, thoroughly outworn by the three-days’ forced
march coming upon the heels of two weeks of drilling and blasting
and shovelling, had no curiosity sharp enough to keep him going,
after the burros had been stabled and lodgings had been secured in
the least crowded of the hotels; but Philip bolted his supper hastily
and announced his intention of proceeding at once in search of an
assay office.
“You won’t find one open at this time of night,” the play-boy yawned.
“There’s another day coming, or if there isn’t, it won’t matter for any
of us.”
“I tell you, I’m not going to wait!” Philip snapped impatiently; and he
departed, leaving Bromley to smoke and doze in the crowded and ill-
smelling hotel office which also served as the bar-room.
It was perhaps an hour later when Bromley, who, in spite of the
noise and confusion of the place, had been sleeping the sleep of
utter exhaustion in his chair in the corner of the smoke-befogged
bar-room, was awakened by a shot, a crash of glass and a strident
voice bellowing, “Yippee! That’s the kind of a hellion I am! Walk up,
gen’lemen, an’ le’s irrigate; the drinks’re on me. Th’ li’l’ ol’ prospect
hole’s gone an’ turned an ace an’ I’m paintin’ the town. Yippee! Line
up, gen’lemen, an’ name yer pizen. Big Ike’s buyin’ fer th’ crowd!”
Vaguely, through the smoke fog, Bromley saw a burly miner, bearded
like a fictional pirate, beckoning the bar-room crowd up to the bar,
weaving pistol in hand. Possibly, if he had been fully awake, he
would have understood that the easy way to avoid trouble with a
manifestly drunken roisterer was by the road of quietly following the
example of the others. But before he could gather his faculties the
big man had marked him down.
“Hey, there—yuh li’l’ black-haired runt in th’ corner! Tail in yere afore
I make yuh git up an’ dance fer th’ crowd!” he shouted. “I’m a rip-
snortin’ hell-roarer fr’m ol’ Mizzoo, an’ this is my night fer flappin’ my
wings—yippee!”
Bromley was awake now and was foolish enough to laugh and wave
the invitation aside airily. Instantly there was a flash and crash, and
the window at his elbow was shattered.
“L-laugh at me, will yuh!” stuttered the half-crazed celebrator. “Git up
an’ come yere! I’m goin’ to make yuh drink a whole durn’ quart o’
red-eye fer that! Come a-runnin’, I say, afore I——”
The door opened and Philip came in. He had heard the shot, but was
wholly unprepared for what he saw; Bromley, his partner, white as a
sheet and staggering to his feet at the menace of the revolver in the
drunken miner’s fist; the shattered window and bar mirror; the
group of card players and loungers crowding against the bar, and the
barkeeper ducking to safety behind it.
In the drawing of a breath a curious transformation came over him.
Gone in an instant were all the inhibitions of a restrained and
conventional childhood and youth, and in their room there was only
a mad prompting to kill. At a bound he was upon the big man, and
the very fierceness and suddenness of the barehanded attack made
it successful. With his victim down on the sawdust-covered floor, and
the pistol wrested out of his grasp, he swung the clubbed weapon to
beat the fallen man over the head with it and would doubtless have
had a human life to answer for if the bystanders had not rushed in
to pull him off with cries of “Let up, stranger—let up! Can’t you see
he’s drunk?”
Philip stood aside, half-dazed, with the clubbed revolver still grasped
by its barrel. He was gasping, not so much from the violence of his
exertions as at the appalling glimpse he had been given of the
potentialities within himself; of the purely primitive and savage
underman that had so suddenly risen up to sweep away the last
vestiges of the traditions, to make his tongue like a dry stick in his
mouth with a mad thirst for blood.
It was Bromley who drew him away, and nothing was said until they
had climbed the rough board stair and Bromley was lighting the
lamp in the room they were to share. Then, in an attempt to lessen
the strain under which he knew his companion was laboring, he
said: “It’s lucky for me that you didn’t have your real fighting clothes
on, that night when I tried to hold you up, Philip. There wouldn’t
have been anything left of me if you had really meant business. Did
you find an assay shop?”
Philip dropped into a chair and nodded. “A sampling works that runs
night and day. We’ll get the results in the morning.”
“For richer?—or poorer?”
“I wish to God I knew! I showed the assayer some of the quartz, but
he wouldn’t commit himself; he talked off; said you could never tell
from the looks of the stuff; that the bright specks we’ve been
banking on might not be metal at all. God, Harry!—if it were only
morning!” he finished, and his eyes were burning.
“Easy,” said Bromley soothingly. “You mustn’t let it mean so much to
you, old man. You’ve worked yourself pretty well up to the breaking
point. There are plenty of other gulches if ours shouldn’t happen to
pan out. Get your clothes off and turn in. That’s the best thing to do
now.”
Philip sprang up and began to walk the floor of the small bed-room.

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Paul s Intercessory Prayers The Significance of the

Signs Wonders and Gifts Divination in the Letters of

Mary Telfair to Mary Few Selected Letters 1802 1844 1st

Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America 1st Edition

Religion and the Law in America An Encyclopedia of

Single Variable Essential Calculus Early

Stanislavsky in America an actor s workbook 1st Edition

a single mor av ian woman

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Volumes in the Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies Series take

Bill Leonard, Wake Forest University

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The Pennsylvania State University Press

19140-Gordon_Letters.indd iii 5/1/18 3:59 PM

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free

19140-Gordon_Letters.indd iv 5/1/18 3:59 PM

List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

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22. To Catherine Wistar, November 3, 1786 (68)

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52. To Elizabeth Drinker, March 22, 1798 (180)

Appendix A: Mary Penry’s Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

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1 Bethlehem, 1757, by Nicholas Garrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

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This volume would be impossible without the generosity of the institutions

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assistant archivist at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, who helped me in

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HUGH PENRY OF ABERSENNY m.  ELINOR PENRY

JAMES m. BRIDGET SMALL

PENRY ELIZA JOHN THOMAS

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SARAH m .  GEORGE REECE

JOHN m.  SARAH CLEMENT

ANTHONY m.  MARGARET PHILIPS

ANTHONY m. ANN CATHERINE m. ROBERT RUMSEY

SARAH m. MAURICE BATEMAN

MARY m.  HUGH PENRY

MARTHA m.  ADAM TUCK

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Information in notes about individuals’ births, deaths, and marriages, and

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ALS Autograph letter signed by Mary Penry

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America tells the story of four women—the Philadelphian Deborah Reed

2. Gundersen, To Be Useful, 15.

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