According to history, the few remaining Lutherans did not give up their church without a struggle. On a certain bright July Sunday the two congregations met, each with its minister at the head, accompanied by many people from both sides of the river and the Justices of the Peace who carried staves of office. Birgert Meynders, a burly blacksmith and bold defender of the Lutheran faith, fell crushed by the falling door, and then the jubilant English rushed in to hold the fort. It was after this memorable riot that the Reverend Hezekiah Watkins,[23] a most excellent clergyman, preached his first sermon in Newburgh, possibly from a text in the psalter for the day, “Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?” [Illustration: HENRY KIRKE BROWN.] Legend says some Lutheran boys on a moonless August night stole the bell and buried it in a swamp where, punished for apostasy, it lay for years tongue-tied in the black mud while hoarse frogs croaked their pessimistic comments over it. The defeated Lutherans would doubtless have been pleased could they have foreseen half a century later when all that savored of England, were it book, bell or candle, was out of favor, the Anglicans in their turn ejected, the building used as a schoolhouse, and the rent of the Glebe lands pass entirely from the Church. The swamp in which the bell was hidden has of late years been transformed into one of Downing Park’s lakes, and from its smooth waters one may hear on summer evenings the ghostly tolling of bells, as bells toll in the buried cities beneath Swiss lakes. The tolling has a martial sound, a call to arms, as if the little bell had forgotten the smaller church squabble in the larger quarrel between King George and his Colonies. Some authorities insist that the bell was dug up, and that it gladly used its long silent tongue in Freedom’s cause as behooved a Liberty Bell. It hung during the present century, old inhabitants tell us, in the cupola of the Newburgh Academy, and was at length sold and melted for a new one by an iconoclastic school Board. At the breaking out of the war for American Independence there were but a dozen or more houses on the Glebe, and a few to the south. Among these was the stone residence of Colonel Jonathan Hasbrouck which had been built in part by Birgert Meynders. Lieutenant Cadwallader Colden had his home near and there were many among his satellites willing to drink damnation to the Whigs when asked by the ever vigilant Committee of Safety to sign the pledge.