Extracts of several letters of Pastorius to his friends in Germany,An extract of William Penn's account of Pennsylvania, in a letter to his friends in London, &c.

The whole seems to be an extract (im anszug) with notes, done from some larger work.

Arents Klincken came from Holland with William Penn in his first voyage in 1682. He had seen and known Penn in Holland. He built the first two story house ever raised in Germantown; and Penn was present and partook of the raising dinner; the same old stone house on Justus Johnson's premises. He died at the age of 80. He left a son whose name was

Anthony Klincken, a great hunter, who spent a long life in such exercises. He used to have the garret of the house filled in the winter with wild game, and had it marked with the date when he killed it, so as to eat it in due succession as an epicure. The same house next to Justus Johnson's premises. He even purchased a German Yager, celebrated for shooting, to aid him in his field sports; he had iron prickers to the hands and feet to aid in climbing lofty trees for crows' scalps, which bore a premium. He used to wade the Wissahiccon in the depth of winter; finally contracted rheumatism and gout, which so ossified the flesh of his knuckles, that he could scrape chalk from them when old! He never went to Philadelphia without taking his gun with him in the spring and fall, and never came home without several geese or ducks, which he had killed in a spatterdock pond, then at the corner of Fourth and High streets! He called it the best game pond any where to be found. This was probably about the years 1700 to 1710. He used also to speak with wonder of seeing hundreds of rats in the flats among the spatterdocks at Pool's bridge, and that he was in the habit of killing them for amusement as fast as he could load. He was born about the year 1677, and died about 1759, aged about 82 years.

As early as 1700 there were four hermits living near Germantown -John Seelig, Kelpius, Bony, and Conrad Mathias. They lived near Wissahiccon and the Ridge. Benjamin Lay lived in a cave near the York Road, at Branchtown.

John Kelpius, the hermit, was a German of Sieburgen in Transylvania, of an eminent family, (tradition says he was noble,) and a student of Dr. John Fabritius, at Helmstadt. He was also a correspondent of Mæcken, chaplain to the Prince of Denmark in London. He came to this country in 1694 with John Seelig, Barnard Kuster, (Coster,) Daniel Falkener, and about forty-two others, being generally men of education and learning, to devote themselves, for piety's sake, to a solitary or single life; and receiving the appellation of the "Society of the Woman in the wilderness." They first arrived among the Germans at Germantown, where they shone awhile " as a peculiar light," but they settled chiefly "on the Ridge," then a wilderness. In 1708, Kelpius, who was regarded as their leader, died "in the midst of his days," (said to be 35,)-after his death the members

began to fall in with the world around them, and some of them to break their avowed religious intentions by marrying. Thus the society lost its distinctive character and died away; but previous to their dispersion they were joined about the year 1704 by some others, among whom was Conrad Mathias, (the last of the Ridge hermits,) a Switzer, and by Christopher Witt, (sometimes called Dr. Witt of Germantown,) a professor of medicine, and a "magus" or diviner. After the death of Kelpius, the faith was continued in the person of John Seelig who had been his companion, and was also a scholar. Seelig lived many years after him as a hermit, and was remarkable for resisting the offers of the world, and for wearing a coarse garment like that of Kelpius. This Seelig records the death of his friend Kelpius in 1708, in a MS. Hymn Book of Kelpius', (set to music,) which I have seen-saying he died in his garden, and attended by all his children, (spiritual ones, and children whom he taught gratis,) weeping as for the loss of a father. That Kelpius was a man of learning is tested by some of his writings; a very small-written book of one hundred pages, once in my possession. It contains his writings in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German and English: and this last (which is very remarkable, he being a foreigner,) is very free and pure. The journal of his voyage to this country, in sixteen pages, is all in Latin; some of his letters (of which there are several in German, and two in English) are in Latin: they are all on religious topics, and saving his peculiar religious opinions, reason very acutely and soberly. From venturing with the thousands of his day to give spiritual interpretations to Scripture, where it was not so intended, he fell upon a scheme of religion which drove him and other students from the Universities of Germany, and under the name of Pietists, &c., to seek for some immediate and strange revelations. He and his friends therefore expected the millennium year was close at hand-so near that he told the first Alex. Mack (the first of the Germantown Tunkers) that he should not die till he saw it! He believed also that" the woman in the wilderness," mentioned in the Revelations, was prefigurative of the great deliverance that was then soon to be displayed for the church of Christ. As she was "to come up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved," so the beloved in the wilderness, laid aside all other engagements, (i. e. being hermits, and trimming their lamps and adorning themselves with holiness, that they may be prepared to meet the same with joy.) "Therefore they did well to observe the signs of the times, and every new phenomenon (whether moral or preternatural) of meteors, stars, or colours of the skies, if peradventure the harbinger may appear." He argued too, that there was a three-fold wilderness, like state of progression in spiritual holiness: to wit," the barren, the fruitful and the wilderness state of the elect of God." In the last state, after which he was seeking, as a highest degree of holiness, he believed it very essential to attain it by dwelling in solitude or in the wilderness: therefore he argues Moses' holiness by being prepared forty years in the

wilderness-Christ's being tempted forty days in the wilderness as an epitome of the other-John the Baptist coming from the wilderness, &c. He thought it thus proved that holy men might be thus qualified to come forth among men again, to convert whole cities, and to work signs and wonders. He was much visited by religious persons. Kelpius professed love and charity with all-but desired to live without a name or sect. The name they obtained was given by others. There are two of Kelpius' MS. Hymn Books still extant in Germantown: one of his own composing, in German, is called elegant; they are curious, too, because they are all translated into English poetry (line for line) by Dr. C. Witt, the diviner or magus. The titles of some of them may exhibit the mind of the author:

"Of the wilderness-or Virgin-Cross love."

"The contentment of the God-loving soul."

"Of the power of the new virgin-body wherein the Lord revealeth his mysteries."

"A loving moan of the disconsolate soul."

ness.

Colloquium of the soul with itself."

Upon Rest after he had been wearied with Labour in the wilder

Although he looked for a qualification to go forth and convert towns and cities in the name of the Lord, it is manifest, that neither he nor his companions were enthusiastic enough to go into the world without such endowment. They often held religious meetings in their hermitage, with people who solicited to come to them for the purpose. Kelpius' hut or house stood on the hill where the widow Phoebe Riter now lives. Her log house has now stood more than forty years on the same cellar foundation which was his; it is on a steep descending grassy hill, well exposed to the sun for warmth in the winter, and has a spring of the hermit's making, half down the hill, shaded by a very stout cedar tree. After Kelpius' hut went down, the foxes used to burrow in his cellar; he called the place the "Burrow of Rocks, or Rocksburrow"-now Roxborough.

Doctor Christopher Witt was born in England (in Wiltshire) in 1675: came to this country in 1704, and died in 1765, aged 90. He was a skilful physician and a learned man; was reputed a magus or diviner, or in grosser terms a conjuror; and was a student and a believer in all the learned absurdities and marvellous pretensions of the Rosicrucian philosophy. The Germans of that day, and indeed many of the English, practised the casting of nativities -and as this required mathematical and astronomical learning, it of ten followed that such a competent scholar was called " a fortune teller." Doctor Witt "cast nativities," and was called a conjuror: while Christopher Lehman, who was a scholar and a friend of Witt, and could cast nativities, and did them for all of his own nine children, but never for hire, was called a notary public, a surveyor, and a gentleman.