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daily, consisting mainly of psalm singing. It is still told in Pella how the rough seamen showed proper respect for these services, and how with bared heads they crowded around the psalm singers. The ships were dirty when they went aboard, but long before they reached Baltimore the people had made their sea habitations as clean as proverbial Dutch kitchens. The health officers at Baltimore were so impressed with the cleanliness of the ships that the immigrants were allowed to land, practically, without the usual inspections. The captains testified that they had never brought across the Atlantic more orderly or better behaved people.
Maryland was beautiful in the verdure of May. How glad they were at the sight of land! But Baltimore bewildered these men and women of simple faith. Like the strictest of the Puritans, they had eschewed all amusements, and reduced their lives to a solemn barrenness the grandeur of which lay in the rugged outlines which no verdure softened. Baltimore seemed to them a wicked city. The dance halls in the lower wards shocked them most. In all their later experiences only one other thing shocked them as much, and that was the sight of women smoking pipes in the doorways of unswept cabins.
On their departure from Baltimore a scene was enacted that outdid that of Æneas carrying his father from burning Troy. One of the immigrants found that his aged mother, an invalid, had been left behind. He ran about frantically, trying to make people understand that he wanted a conveyance of some sort. Time was limited, but his fears were not. Finally despair seized him, and picking up his mother he carried her in his arms through the streets of the city to the train which was waiting. This man was Dirk Synhorst. He stood six feet tall, built like a giant. He and the mother he cared for so tenderly have both gone to their last rest.
The journey inland was a very tiresome one. The American railway was still in its beginning. The cars were small, hardly accommodating eight persons comfortably, and these were jerked and jolted over a rough road. The cars were drawn up the steeper grades by stationary engines. The immigrants had never seen so many mountains. They longed for the prairies which they were told lay to the west. At Columbia, Pennsylvania, they were packed into dirty and inadequate canal boats, like herring in boxes. In these boats they remained fourteen days, when they reached Pittsburg. They were used to canals and canal boats in Holland-picturesque craft on strips of water between green meadows and cultivated fields; but the American canal climbed hills by means of locks, crossed rivers on aqueducts, and tunneled mountains. From Pittsburg the journey was down the then national highway, the Ohio river, and thence to St. Louis.
In St. Louis they sojourned several weeks, but it was in the intense heat of an American summer, and many of them suffered greatly. Mr. Scholte, in one of his pamphlets, tells us that few died at sea, four on the journey from Baltimore to St. Louis, but many in the latter place. The record adds: "They died like Christians, witnessing that death was their gain." But even greater troubles grew out of the reports, which had been widely published in the newspapers of the day, that these Hollanders were the possessors of great wealth. In the same pamphlet it is stated that everywhere many people came to stare at the strangely-carved chests which were supposed to contain riches as fabulous as those of Peru. In consequence of these rumors, also, the people with whom they had business dealings charged them more than they charged Irish and German immigrants for the same services. While they rested in St. Louis, they "sent out spies after the manner of the children of Israel," to find a location for the colony. Of this commission, two are still living, Isaac Overkamp of Pella, and Teunis Keppel of Michigan.