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student of American literature, should he search through histories, bibliographies, and catalogues of libraries for traces of Christopher Dock or his works, would follow a vain quest. The attrition of the great sea of human affairs during the course of a century and a half has left of the pious schoolmaster, as the early Germans of Pennsylvania were wont to call him, only a name, and of his reputation, nothing, Watson, the annalist, says, that in 1740 Christopher Dock taught school in the old Mennonite log church, in Germantown; the catalogue of the American Antiquarian Society contains the title of his “Schul-ordnung” under the wrong year; and these meagre statements are the only references to him I have ever been able to find in any English book. There may be men still living who have heard from their grandfathers of his kindly temper and his gentle sway, but memory is uncertain, and they are rapidly disappearing. Between the leaves of old Bibles and in out-of-the-way places in country garrets, perhaps, are still preserved some of the Schrifften, and birds and flowers which he used to write and paint as rewards for his dutiful scholars, but whose was the hand that made them has long been forgotten. The good which he did has been interred with his bones, and all that he did was good. The details of his life that can now be ascertained are very few, but such as they are it is a fitting task to gather them together. The eye will sometimes leave the canvas on which are depicted the gaudy robes of a Catharine Cornaro, or the fierce passions