says the nursery rhyme. Here the evolution of a parish has for its germ the church and steeple, the minister and all the people being a later development. The germ of this Lutheran parish was the minister, Joshua de Kockerthal,[21] whose missionary labors on both sides of the river cannot be overestimated. After the minister came not the church nor the steeple, but the bell, a gift from no less a lady of quality than Queen Anne herself. It was highly prized by these Lutherans and loaned to a church in New York on condition that “should we be able to build a church at our own expense at any time thereafter then the Lutheran Church of New York shall restore to us the same bell such as it now is or another of equal weight and value.” [Illustration: ANDREW J. DOWNING.] The church was built probably in 1730, and the Reverend Michael Christian Knoll was appointed to minister in the parish, a part of his salary to be paid in cheeples of wheat, sustenance certainly more nourishing than the codfish received by the minister on Cape Cod in lieu of pew-rent in gold coin of the realm. The church itself, which was standing in 1846 within the memory of a few of Newburgh’s citizens, was about twenty feet square without floor or chimney. The roof ran up into a point from its four walls, and on the peak a small cupola was placed in which hung Queen Anne’s bell. This bell, evidently not cast in the mould of the one unalterable Confession of Augsburg, but bewitched by its donor with Episcopacy, presently rang out changes and ceased to “call the living, mourn the dead and break the lightning” exclusively in behalf of the German Lutherans. The English were now buying farms from the discouraged Germans whose complaint that their patent was all upland can hardly be denied by any one who, aided by a rope, climbs Newburgh’s hilly streets to-day. The story, however, that the United States Government located the city’s post-office on a shelf-like site so that shy lovers in search of a billet-doux need not call at the window but may look down the building’s chimney from a street above is probably apocryphal. The Palatines abandoned Newburgh for a more fertile soil in Pennsylvania and elsewhere about 1747. The newcomers, who were mostly of English and Scotch descent, took their places, so that nothing remains to tell of the early settlers save the streets they laid out and the church in the Old Town burying-ground whose site is now marked by Quassaick Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution.[22]