The Palatines, as previously intimated, were refugees from the Palatinate of the Rhine, in Germany, and were driven from their homes for having embraced the principles of Luther and of the Reformation. Thousands fled to the camp of the Duke of Marlborough; and seven thousand were brought to England in 1709. Of these, three thousand were sent to America; a few remained in England; and the rest were removed to Ireland, and settled principally on the estate of Lord Southwell, in the neighbourhood of Ballingran, where each man was supplied with a musket, called “a Queen Anne,” to protect himself and family; while for every man, woman, and child, eight acres of ground were leased, at the annual rental of five shillings per acre, which the government, who wished to encourage the protestant interest, engaged to pay for the first twenty years. Having no gospel minister, these fugitive Germans soon became “eminent for drunkenness, cursing, swearing, and an utter neglect of religion.” Now they were again reformed; “an oath was rarely heard among them, or a drunkard seen”; they had built a preaching house; numbers were Methodists; and those that were not imitated the Methodists, by forming themselves into classes, and by holding meetings for Christian fellowship. They continued to be a serious, thinking people. “By their diligence,” says Wesley, “they turned all their land into a garden.” Days of darkness, however, soon came. Rents were so raised, that tenants were starved, and obliged to emigrate. In 1760, a company of these, now oppressed, Irish Palatines embarked at Limerick, as Christian emigrants, for America. The crowd who saw them leave little thought that two of that small band on board—Philip Embury, the local preacher, and Barbara Heck, the honest Methodist—were destined, in the mysterious providence of God, to influence for good countless myriads of human beings, and that their names would live as long as the sun and moon endure. That little and unpretending ship contained the germ of all the Methodist churches of the United States; churches which have now more or less beneath their influence about eight millions of the population of that prosperous hemisphere. Leaving the Palatines, Wesley and Thomas Walsh proceeded to Limerick. At Ennis, he preached in the “courthouse, to a huge, wild, unawakened multitude, protestants and papists, many of whom would have been rude enough if they durst.” Riding through the counties of Galway and Connaught, Wesley and Walsh came to Castlebar, in the county of Mayo. For ten days, this was the centre of their operations. Wesley preached repeatedly in the churches at Castlebar, Hollymount, and Ballyheen, to large and attentive congregations.