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he.' `Prince Gallitzin?' `At your service, sir; I am that very exalted personage,' saying this, he laughed heartily. `You may perhaps, wonder,' he continued, when I had presented to him a letter from the Bishop of Philadelphia, `at my singular retinue. But how can it be helped? We have not as yet, as you see, roads fit for wagons; we should be either fast or upset every moment. I cannot any longer ride horseback, having injured myself by a fall, and it is also coming hard for me to walk; besides I have all the requirements for mass to take with me. I am now on my way to a place where I have had for some years a station. You can now go on quietly to Loretto and make yourself comfortable there, I shall be at home this evening; or if you like better, you can come with me, perhaps it may interest you.' I chose to accompany him, and after riding some miles through the woods, we reached a genuine Pennsylvania farm house.
"Here lived Joshua Parrish, one of the first settlers of that country, and the ancestor of a numerous posterity. The Catholics of the neighborhood, men, women and children, were already assembled in great numbers around the house, in which an altar was put up, its principal materials having been taken from the sled; Gallitzin then sat down in one corner to hear confessions, and I, in another corner attended a few Germans. The whole affair appeared very strange to me, but it was extremely touching to see the simple peasant home, with all its home furniture, and the great fireplace, in which there was roasting and boiling going on at the same time changed into a church; while the people, with their prayer books and their reverential manners, stood or knelt under the low projecting roof or under the trees, going in or out, just as their turn came for confession. After mass, at which Father Gallitzin preached, and when a few children had been baptized, the altar was taken away, and the dinner table set in its place. * * *
In a word, all was so pleasant and friendly that involuntarily the love feasts of the first Christmas came to my mind. In the afternoon we went slowly on our way, Gallitzin in his sled and I on horseback, arriving at nightfall at Loretto."
Father Lemke went back to Philadelphia, but soon returned to Loretto, expecting to live there with Gallitzin, but on the morning following his arrival Father Gallitzin
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