ove feasts. The sisters now invited the brethren, and
next the brethren entertained the sisters--with unbuttered parsnips and
draughts of innocent clear water, no doubt.

That which was most remarkable at Ephrata, and that out of which grows
my story, was the music. Brother Friedsam, besides his cares of
organization, finance, and administration, and his mystical theological
speculations, was also a poet. Most of the songs sung in the little
building called "Zion" were written by him--songs about "the lonesome
turtledove in the wilderness," that is, the Church; songs in praise of
the mystical marriage of virgins with the chaste Lamb; songs about the
Philadelphian brotherhood of saints, about the divine Sophia, and about
many other things which no man can understand, I am sure, until he has
first purified himself from the gross humors of the flesh by a heavenly
diet of turnips and spring water. To the brethren and sisters who
believed their little community in the Pennsylvania woods to be "the
Woman in the Wilderness" seen by St. John, these words represented the
only substantial and valuable things in the wide universe; and they
sang the songs of Conrad Beissels with as much fervor as they could
have sung the songs of heaven itself. Beissels--the Friedsam of the
brotherhood--was not only the poet but the composer of the choral
songs, and a composer of rare merit. The music he wrote is preserved as
it was copied out with great painstaking by the brethren and sisters.
In looking over the wonderful old manuscript notebook, the first
impression is one of delight with the quaint symbolic illuminations
wrought by the nuns of Ephrata upon the margins. But those who know
music declare that the melodies are lovely, and that the whole
structure of the harmonies is masterful, and worthy of the fame they
had in the days when monks and nuns performed them under the lead of
Brother Friedsam himself. In the gallery of Zion house, but concealed
from the view of the brethren, sat the sisterhood, like a company of
saints in spotless robes. Below, the brethren, likewise in white,
answered to the choir above in antiphonal singing of the loveliest and
most faultless sort. Strangers journeyed from afar over rough country
roads to hear this wonderful chorus, and were moved in the depths of
their souls with the indescribable sweetness and loftiness of the
music, and with the charm and expressiveness of its rendering by these
pale-faced other-w