The Swedish community of some seven hundred souls, cut off from reinforcement and support from the fatherland, cherished its language and traditions and the mold of doctrine in which it had been shaped; after more than forty years the reviving interest of the mother church was manifested by the sending out of missionaries to seek and succor the daughter long absent and neglected in the wilderness.

Two venerable buildings, the Gloria Dei Church in the southern part of Philadelphia, and the Old Swedes' Church at Wilmington, remain as monuments of the honorable story.

The Swedish language ceased to be spoken; the people became undistinguishably absorbed in the swiftly multiplying population about them.
* * * * * It was a short-lived triumph in which the Dutch colony reduced the Swedish under its jurisdiction.

It only prepared a larger domain for it to surrender, in its turn, to superior force.

With perfidy worthy of the House of Stuart, the newly restored king of England, having granted to his brother, the Duke of York, territory already plighted to others and territory already occupied by a friendly power, stretching in all from the Connecticut to the Delaware, covered his designs with friendly demonstrations, and in a time of profound peace surprised the quiet town of New Amsterdam with a hostile fleet and land force and a peremptory demand for surrender.